Social documentary photography

The chapter as a whole illustrates some of the possibilities and problems currently haunting the area of Jewish participation in the making and the history of feminist art in the United States.The signficance that gender, class, Jewishness, Marxism, and nationalism have for Martha Rosler is evident throughout her work, though her artistic practice has only recently been written about from such an intersectional perspective.

This article is based on a selection of images of girls and young ladies – the future women of America – that figure predominantly in visual representations in the 19th century, in painting and, in the second part of the century, in photography. As an icon of America’s future, white middle-class American girls became a major subject matter and were represented in a variety of media and situations in comparison to Native American and Black girls, whose depiction is extremely rare but symbolically very telling if we consider their role in society from a white perspective. A common thread is the lack of agency in American girls throughout the century in comparison to the representations of boys; they are commonly objectified, supposedly pure and innocent, belonging to the separate sphere of domesticity. But they do not always comply with this vision inherited from the Cult of Motherhood. A form of empowerment can be found in subject matters related to education, more than in tomboy depictions. Access to education is truly paramount in the process of agency while, at this time, working at a young age in difficult conditions was far from being key to any form of independence.

21. yüzyılda özellikle toplumsal ve siyasal hayatın örgütlenmesinde sosyal
medya başta olmak üzere alternatif yeni medya kanalları, mobil cihazlara sahip herkesin görüntü üretimi ve tüketimi pratiği, postmodernizmle başlayan toplumsal olanın ne olduğuna ilişkin sorgulamaları başka bir boyuta taşımıştır. Sanal ve gerçek ayrımlarının özellikle ekran merkezli teknolojik atılımlara bağlı olarak siliniyor oluşu imgenin toplumsal bağlamda işlevini değiştirirken, toplumsal belgesel fotoğrafı bu gelişmelere paralel olarak nasıl konumlandıracağımız, bu tezin konusunu oluşturmaktadır. Toplumsal sorunların çözümü için fotoğrafı aktivist bir çaba için kullanan belgesel fotoğrafın, konusunu nasıl gösterdiği ve hangi bağlama yerleştirdiği fotoğraf teorisinin tartışmalı alanlarından biridir. Bu nedenle yeni medyanın interaktif, şeffaf ve demokratik yapısı belgesel fotoğrafı kavramsal olarak özgürleştirmiştir. Dolayısıyla 21. yüzyıl iletişim ve bilgi teknolojileri daha adil, eşit ve özgür bir dünya için ‘diyalog’ yaratma biçimini görüntü üzerinden kurgulasa da tek başına fotoğrafın özerkliğinden bahsedemeyiz. Bunun için de bu tez, yeni medya kimliğiyle toplumsal belgesel fotoğrafı, kolektif ve katılımcı bir süreci aktivizm olarak kurgulayan ve belgesel fotoğrafı genel gerçek idealinden kurtararak, hikaye anlatıcısının bakış açısına eş değer, medyalar arası bir platformda, anlatı kurma biçimi olarak ele almıştır.

In the set-up of especially social and political life in 21st century, new
alternative media channels, social media being in the first place, image production and consumption practice of everyone that own mobile devices have transferred the questions that arose with postmodernism regarding what is social to a different dimension. While the fact that the differentiation between the virtual and the real is fading based on screen-based technological breakthrough changes the function of the image in the social context, the subject of this thesis focuses on how we could position the social documentary photography in parallel with these changes. One of
the debated fields of the photography theory is how the documentary photography, which uses photograph in an activist effort for the resolution of social issues, shows and contextualizes its subject. Therefore, the interactive, transparent and democratic nature of new media has conceptually liberalized photography. For this reason, even though the communication and information technologies of the 21st century build its
pattern of creating a “dialogue” based on the image, we cannot talk about the autonomy of photography alone. As a consequence, this thesis covers the social documentary photography as a narrative form on an inter-media platform which is equal to the narrator’s point of view that builds a collective and participative process as activism and saves the documentary photography from the common ideal of real.

This article reconsiders the politics and aesthetics of aftermath photography. Many critics have argued that the emerging, experimental genre of documentary photography ‘abstracts’ and renders ‘sublime’ the traumatic historical events that it takes as its subject matter. While these terms accurately reflect the aesthetics of aftermath photography, their politics cannot, the author argues, be so easily dismissed. The article reconsider the genre through Gene Ray's theories of the sublime and Rosemary Laing's photograph welcome to Australia (2004), which documents the Woomera refugee detention centre, in order to offer a better understanding of what is at stake in this new mode of documentary photography.

Third Text, 28.6 (December, 2014), 555-562

Free download for those without access to Third Text:

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/65x3pFdkmTNRu4ZkQbj9/full

Or
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09528822.2014.970775#.VbMVRjWzq-0

Reframing the subject/Reframing the self: The interchange between subjects and insider researcher in documentary photography using an applied feminist ethical and aesthetic framework in the project, ‘A Matter of Time’
This submission for PhD is comprised of two parts: a studio research component in the form of a book of photographs and interviews, and a dissertation (30,000 words) that speaks to the studio outcome.
I began this documentary research project in 2008. First I had to find eight lesbians participants willing to go on the record (visual and text) about the following question: What was it like living in Queensland during the particularly conservative socio-political era of the mid to late 20th Century and how do you interpret that experience to have contributed to who you are today?”
My research began as a transmedia documentary project, with a methodological framework in mind (photo elicitation, video interview, documentary photography) and an ethical approach that soon advanced from a photojournalistic code of practice (NPPA 2012).
As the field work progressed, I began to exhibit the work publicly; first as a series of four short videos in the Prejudice & Pride (2010) exhibition at the Museum of Brisbane, then as a longer-form video at the Stepping Out: A Selection of Current Practice by Postgraduate Visual Art Researchers at QCA Griffith University exhibition at POP Gallery (2011). I then began to test the still photography in exhibition spaces. I tried combining photo elicitation text with images in 2012. In 2013 I had a solo exhibition of images without text at the Brisbane Powerhouse. This final exhibition and the feedback I received from the thousands of visitors, helped inform the way in which I would produce my final submission for this assessment. I decided on a book, North of The Border: Stories from the A Matter of Time Project (2014). 
These decisions occurred progressively as the work I was producing and the literature I was reading formed a dialectic that helped me to refine my project. I realised early on in the field work that as an insider, I could no longer operate as a bipartisan, objective observer. This materialised in the visual approach I was developing, out of necessity to remain true to the participants and to myself in the interchanges that were occurring. In the process of field work and exhibition, and through a lengthy literature review, I have developed a feminist ethical framework that addresses both the applied methodologies of fieldwork and the resulting aesthetic, in its finished form: the book, North of the Border.
Exploring what Elspeth Probyn (1996) describes as the “interrelation of history, place and sexuality,” this research posits a new approach to insider documentary practice in photography through a particular reading of situated lesbian space and its ambiguities. By documenting each participant’s experience in photographs and through personal history, and in its accompanying theoretical/exegetical dissertation, the project advances a repositioning of the experience of being a middle-aged lesbian in the State of Queensland. The work argues for a counter-narrative of Queer as an ontology rather than as an act of subversion.

This paper discusses artistic documentary photography from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from the mid-1970s until the fall of the Berlin Wall, and suggests that it functioned as a substitute public–Ersatzöffentlichkeit–in society. This concept of a substitute public sphere sometimes termed a counter-public sphere, relates to GDR literature that, in retrospect, has been allocated this role. On the whole, in critical discourse certain texts have been recognised as being distinct from GDR propaganda which sought to deliver alternative readings in their coded texts. I propose that photography, despite having had a different status to literature in the GDR, adopted similar traits and also functioned as part of a substitute public sphere. These photographers aimed to expose the existing gap between the propagandised and actual life under socialism. They embedded a moral and critical position in their photographs to comment on society and to incite debate. However, it was necessary for these debates to occur in the private sphere, so that artists and their audience would avoid state persecution. In this paper, I review Harald Hauswald's series Everyday Life (1976–1990) to demonstrate how photographs enabled substitute discourses in visual ways. Hauswald is a representative of artistic documentary photography and although he was never published in the official GDR media, he was the first East German photographer to publish in renowned West German and European media outlets, such as GEO magazine and ZEITmagazin, before the reunification. In 1990, he founded the 'Ostkreuz–Agency of Photographers' with six other East German documentary photographers.

Mindanao is the Philippine's second largest island in the south. Identifying Mindanao-based documentaries that have development themes remain unknown or unacknowledged. Using Phenomenology as theoretical framework and method, as a result, the researcher found out that similar to other documentary films in other parts of the country and the world, the themes showed by Mindanao-based documentaries reflect  in agriculture, health, women and children, environment and population.
However unlike its other foreign and local counterparts, a number of Mindanao-based documentaries anchor the mentioned development themes under the context of peace and conflict situation, human rights, indigenous peoples and their ancestral domains.

German-language article on social photography and the visual representation of poverty. Published in: Elisabeth Heyne & Tanja Prokić (Eds.). Invective Gaze – Das digitale Bild und die Kultur der Beschämung. Bielefeld: transcript, 2022 (pp. 57-92).
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839457498-003
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783839457498/html

In 2014 in Guasipati, an agricultural and cattle town in Southeastern Venezuela, I witnessed a group of men of all generations who staged themselves through the orgasmic rite of cockfights. In Geertz's famous ethnography of cockfighting in Bali, the 'irrationality' of betting appears at first as surprising. But cockfighting is a game that dramatizes status and tests group solidarity, it is a measure of moral import and of meaning. This photographic record of masculinities at play in cockfighting builds on Geertz' interpretation. The images were taken in the gallera (cockpit) of Guasipati during a clandestine night. It is here that the participating men engage in a form of capitalist communication that directly questions the Bolivarian Revolution. Many are workers within socialist enterprises, and they tremendously enjoy this illegal and transgressive activity. Within this space, the patterns of exchange become competitive and inscribed in subterranean capitalist circuits, evoking a symbolism of masculine power disputes (who is a man and who not) vis-à-vis the prohibitions of socialism. It is here that illegal enrichment that serves as a source and mark of status within the state controlled economy is effectively played out. Behind the individual and collective euphoria seen in the photographs, there are even more euphoric social tensions of betting and status at work.

I wrote this short paper as part of a series for the Journal of the Gilded Era and Progressive Era hoping to inspire discourse on using Hine's photographs in teaching and writing. Part generated some discussion, but no one seems to have visited part 2. I have chosen to post it here hoping that someone will continue the conversation of hermeneutical examination of photographs as a primary source o information, be they Hine's or another photographer's.

The purpose of this essay is to explore how economic downturns are represented by documentary photography and photojournalism.

To fulfill this I will compare and contrast examples of both documentary photography and photojournalism on the subject of recessions/depressions, produced between 1930 and the present day.  The examples will be drawn from several countries, including the  UK.

In addition, the agendas and motivations behind the styles and subjects of the photographs, as well as the influence of changing technologies on capture and dissemination of photographs will be considered.

FORUM 043, das Ausstellungsformat für junge Fotografie des Münchner Stadtmuseums, präsentiert die Arbeit „Winzerla – Kunst als Spurensuche im Schatten des NSU“ von Sebastian Jung. Winzerla bezeichnet die zu Jena gehörende Plattenbausiedlung, den gemeinsamen Herkunftsort der Mitglieder der rechtsterroristischen Gruppierung NSU (Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund) Uwe Mundlos, Uwe Böhnhardt und Beate Zschäpe.
Auch der Künstler Sebastian Jung wohnte die ersten zehn Jahre seines Lebens in dieser thüringischen Neubausiedlung, die noch zu DDR-Zeiten errichtet und nach der Wende fertiggestellt wurde. In den 1990er-Jahren, in denen sich Mundlos, Bönhardt und Zschäpe radikalisierten, war er selbst noch ein kleiner Junge. Die gemeinsame Herkunft bildet den Ausgangspunkt seiner künstlerischen Reflexion über das Winzerla seiner eigenen Kindheit.

This article highlights the role of visual artists in recording the mutations of a landscape that became industrial and urban. From the late eigteenth century and early nineteenth century onwards the development and the effects of the industrial revolution were starting to be depicted and early representations reflected a celebratory mood or already expressed a degree of fear and anxiety. A century later, L.S. Lowry’s cityscapes captured an ambivalent image of the industrial North of England. His archetypal industrial landscapes—part real, part imaginary—met with success as traces of industry he had represented were vanishing as a result of deindustrialisation and, later, of urban regeneration. Industrial remnants found across the North, such as in Lancashire and West Yorkshire, would later be immortalised by photographers whose representations showed how their presence in the landscape conveys a sense of place whilst maintaining collective identity and memory. Whether they have been preserved as heritage or have simply survived as ruins, mills and chimneys give the landscape and cityscape their historic identity, despite attempts at reshaping them or “de-industrialising” them in post-industrial cities. Yet, one may wonder whether artistic representations of industrial landscapes foster a stereotypically desolate vision of the industrial North or if they draw attention to the aesthetic and historic value of traces of industry, and highlight a reassessment of this type of heritage in relation to the preservation of an identity that may also be at odds with its industrial connection.

The Documentary  School oF Santa Fe and its founder, Fernando Birri, are inescapable references in the story of the New Latin American Cinema. The school grew out of a brief course offered by Birri in 1956. The young Argentine had recently returned from studies at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, and he was asked to help organize a course on film with the Instituto Social at the Universidad Nacional del Litoral (UNL) in Santa Fe, Argentina. The course was deemed a great success and, soon thereafter, Birri and the UNL institutionalized their efforts by establishing the Instituto de Cinematografía, which began offering classes in April 1957. In the years that followed, the IC would further consolidate itself, becoming known across Argentina and throughout Latin American for its focus on social issues of the time.
This chapter returns to 1956 and the beginnings of that experience. There, the local converged with the transnational, and an internationally renowned film program was born out of a faith in amateurs—their knowl- edge, their perspective, and their capacity for self-expression. In Part I, we show how Birri’s initial effort—an introductory course on documentary,offered at the university’s margins (as part of its extension program, out of the social sciences division), and counting among its enrollees painters, schoolteachers, lawyers, even social workers—drew inspiration in equal parts from professional and amateur realms. In Part II, we analyze a key aspect to the filmmaker’s early approach: the use of fotodocumentales—photodocumentaries or photo essays—as a first step for those learning to make films. We reconsider this practice of using photography and social surveys as borrowing from the possibilities of the amateur. The act of taking a pic ture or asking a question made the filmmaking effort accessible to enrollees with little or no background in production, and it was an adequate first step given the limited initial resources of the IC. Most important, fotodocumentales helped focused students’ attention on the capturing of local realities  and on the social possibilities of the cinema. As such, although clearly part of a certain (socially and politically conscious) professionalization project, these practices belong to the broader field of amateur cinematic cultures for providing an alternative vision of cinema’s social function and an alternative means of institutionalizing nonindustrial cinematic practices. In Part III, we focus on the well-known documentary Tire-dié (1958–1960). We look at the project’s evolution from a student-made fotodocumental to the IC’s first documentary film, finished in 1958. We pay special attention to the film’s deliberately noncommercial character, both in terms of how it was produced and how it was used socially, across informal networks of exhibition, through community screenings and postscreening audience surveys. Finally, in Part IV, in order to show their impact in later professional film production at school, we return to those unpublished surveys. We note that Birri and his team utilized commentaries from nonfilmgoing audiences to assess their successes in film and to develop the next set of films—a series that, as with the others, featured almost exclusively amateur actors.
Birri himself was no “amateur,” and his film school quickly became a point of cinematic reference the Latin America, but the initiative, at least in its origins, stemmed from a bottom-up approach, one that drew inspiration, where not direct investment, from local, amateur practices and bases of knowledge. In many ways, it was the IC’s incorporation of amateur participants, from its students and its film subjects to the neighborhood audiences with whom it shared its films, as well as their association with alternative film cultures, such as local “foto” or “cine-clubs,” that proved an ideal means for training future professionals, thus demonstrating the fluid and productive boundaries between the amateur and the professional. In so doing, the IC’s particular approach charted a new path for the institutionalization of innovative cinematic practices.

In:  In: Masha Salazkina and Enrique Fibla (eds.), Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures. Indiana University Press, 2021; 149-168.

Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts (Gente del siglo XX) es el vasto proyecto fotográfico que August Sander desarrolló, no sin dramáticos obstáculos, a lo largo de cuatro décadas. La fotografía que cierra este extraordinario archivo es la de la máscara mortuoria de su hijo mayor, Erich. Esta elección del fotógrafo alemán abre una serie de distintos planteamientos que incitan a la reflexión, entre los que están la mirada del autor y su relación con el sujeto protagonista, el contenido histórico de la imagen y su carga política, su composición, su valor documental y de índice, su cuestionable objetividad, así como su contexto en el marco de la fotografía coetánea y su simbólica función en la producción del artista.
Abstract: Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts (People of the 20th Century) is the vast photographic project that August Sander developed, not without dramatic obstacles, over four decades. The photograph that ends this extraordinary archive is that of the death mask of his eldest son, Erich. The decision of this German photographer opens a series of different questions that provokes a reflection on the author's gaze and his relationship with the subject, the historical content and the political weight of the image, its composition, its documentary and indexical value, its questionable objectivity, and its place in the context of coetaneous photography and its symbolic function in the artist's work.
humanidades.uprrp.edu/visiondoble

With photographs that have never been published before, this is the first English-Spanish bilingual retrospective of a prominent Mexican photographer who has documented Latin America from revolutionary movements to timeless moments of daily life.

Zhuang, Wubin. “Documentary Photography as Self-Expression: The Case of Erik Prasetya and Oscar Motuloh in Indonesia”. "Asian Art", October 2009, 7-8.

*

An article focusing on the practices of Indonesian photographers Erik Prasetya and Oscar Motuloh

At times, the art of having a good day seems quite simple and plain: To Catherine Opie, L.A.- based, fine-art photographer, a good day is literally a day in her studio, working with her camera, having different people come by, and photographing them. In her 5000 square feet studio, a former brewery in downtown Los Angeles, Opie is no stranger to such good days.

Exhibition review and essay on the International Center of Photography's (ICP) exhibition, "Perpetual Revolution: The Image and Social Change."

American Quarterly, Volume 69, Number 4, December 2017, pp. 967-986
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/680495

La revolución y la tierra (2019) de Gonzalo Benavente Sacco desentierra la prehistoria y el legado de la reforma agraria, promulgada en 1969 por el general Velasco Alvarado (1968-1975), a través de materiales fílmicos de la época y entrevistas a diversos personajes afines a este proceso. Un eje central del documental es la insurgencia por la tierra iniciada por el campesinado indígena, que luego fue abanderado por dos modos opuestos de revolución peruana, desde la reforma agraria con los militares y por la vía armada con los grupos de izquierda radical. Estos apuntan a las "masas campesinas" para su liberación, pero ignoran su liderazgo autónomo y agencia indígena. La negación de la cuestión indígena respecto de su relación ontológica con las entidades no humanas (tierra, montaña, lago, río, etc.) ha sido recurrente en las políticas del Estado peruano y su racionalidad occidental. Para las poblaciones andinas y amazónicas, la tierra no sólo es un derecho de posesión individual o colectiva. Forman parte de ella como un complemento espiritual, social y natural. En los Andes, por ejemplo, los runakuna (personas, usualmente quechua hablantes) mantienen una relación "socio-natural" con los tirakuna (entidades no humanas) y ambos forman parte del ayllu (la organización comunal de personas que tienen lazos de parentesco y que habitan un territorio en comunión con los otros seres distintos a los humanos). 1 En ese sentido, estos seres no humanos o "seres tierra" también participan en la vida política y social de las poblaciones indígenas. 2 Por eso hoy salen a defender la "madre naturaleza" del extractivismo devorador. Los últimos minutos del documental de Benavente apenas dejan entrever este ángulo y me gustaría expandir su discusión, no sin antes explicar la ausencia de lo indígena en el experimento revolucionario de Velasco y los grupos insurgentes de la izquierda peruana.

Link to a 26-minute documentary film entitled The War of the Princes of Rain ("La guerra de los príncipes de la lluvia", in Spanish) researched, directed and co-produced by Bernardo Pérez-Soler:

https://vimeo.com/119632830
(Please request password by writing an e-mail to bperezsoler@gmail.com)

The old Macehual Maya experts in the art of recalling events long gone-by from the state of Quintana Roo, Mexico, still evoke vividly and in great detail the final stages of the so-called “Caste War” of Yucatan, even though they did not witness them or ever read anything about them—actually, they never learned how to read.

The vividness of this evocation has to do with the fact that the remembrance of the Caste War is thoroughly intertwined with both Maya religion and agriculture, and, more generally, with how the people who still speak the Yucatec Maya language spend their everyday lives.

This film is about the old stories on the war three of these men recount, and about the main activities those who share (or, in one case, oppose) their beliefs engage in.

Albeit in its present form it is a fully completed short-film, I have recorded enough material to enlarge it into a feature-length film. I, however, did not get enough funding to edit and post-produce such longer version.

This chapter analyzes visual representations of U.S.-American hunger circulated in the context of an anti-hunger campaign in the late 1960s. It demonstrates how visual references to the so-called famine iconography, which depicts a starving child with a bloated belly, both challenged and reinforced Cold War dichotomies between what was termed the “First World” and the “Third World.” In a complex and nuanced move, these photographs strategically enmesh transnational and national(ist) aesthetics and politics of hunger. The Cold War famine iconography thus questioned the moral and social superiority of U.S.-American democratic capitalism and at the same time mobilized notions of U.S. exceptionalism to argue for national social reform.

The Riga Central Market is a landmark structure in the center of Riga, capital city of Latvia. It was built in the 1930s.  Māra Brašmane has photographed everyday life in this market in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and into the 2000s and 2010s. Through the changes in the marketplace you can observe the changes that Latvian society underwent in these decades.

In this very personal essay, commissioned for a photo-book by renowned Latvian photographer Māra Brašmane, I look back at my memories of growing up in Riga of the early 1990s. Her photographs of the Riga Central Market evoke some of the most vivid memories of poverty, despair, and hopelessness that characterize my and my family's life around the time when Latvia restored its independence from the Soviet Union.

This essay examines a body of photography books and exhibitions from the 1990s and 2000s, produced in Britain by professional photographers and supported by social and cultural organizations, which engaged with notions of collective identification and subjectivity, thus making significant political statements at a time when British society was going through major social changes and years of soul-searching. On the one hand, we specifically discuss how notions of identity like class, ethnicity and nation were addressed by photographic projects and were the subject matters for the politicization of the medium in the two decades. We argue that the demise of traditional forms of social documentary within professional art photography allowed for new artists and political issues to emerge. We show how some photographers and galleries engaged with “identity politics” at a time when multiculturalism was taking centre stage both in political and media discourse and in cultural policies. On the other hand, we also explore some of the more indirect ways in which photographers may have construed ways of dealing with notions of belonging, other than identity, or beyond identity, and suggested forms of collective and political subjectivity through concepts of historical and national narrative, connectedness, or social cohesion.

If photographie can change the world is not a new question. My document was in fact a presentation over the subject. All is in Dutch because I study this language.
I chose some iconic photographs. I mention too the rise and some negative sides of recent I-photojournalism.

The photobook Politics and Classes in Hungary presents images
of 20 – largely homogenous – social groups that Policy Solutions
identified and analysed on the basis of a large-sample poll conducted
by GfK Market Research. The aim of this research was to elucidate what kind of people vote for the various political parties in Hungary; what differentiates them from each other; and what factors lead these people to vote for one party rather than another.

(This is an abstract of a book chapter that has been published in the volume 'Global Cinematic Cities: New Landscapes of Film and Media', eds. Andersson & Webb, Wallflower Press 2016).

Jonas Bendiksen’s photo book The Places We Live (2008) consists of pictures of slum-dwellers and their homes. More precisely, it provides a combination of written text and photographic imagery in the form of panoramic folding images of slum exteriors and interiors in four of the most rapidly expanding megacities of the world: Mumbai (India), Caracas (Venezuela), Nairobi (Kenya), and Jakarta (Indonesia). The Places We Live thus promises a quasi-global perspective on what the urban sociologist Mike Davis has proposed to call a ‘planet of slums’, that is, a planet in which by now a vast number of people, approximately one billion, call slums their home. In fact, The Places We Live was published in the exact same year in which, according to many sociologists, mankind encountered a pivotal turning point: since 2008, for the first time in history, more people live in cities than in the countryside. According to Bendiksen, his project is an artistic response to these staggering figures and the historical watershed it involves. However, it was also conceived as a media experiment: Bendiksen published his images not only in a photo book; they have also been used for an interactive web documentary (theplaceswelive.com) as well as for a touring exhibition installation, in both of which slum-dwellers tell their personal stories via recorded (but dubbed) interviews directly to their audience.

Accordingly, this paper argues via new media theories (Bolter and Grusin 2000; Manovich 2001; Grau 2004; Jenkins 2006), that it is not so much the ‘artistry’ of the (social documentary) photographer that lends a new sensory (or immersive) experience to the spectator, but rather the new possibilities of digital media technologies. It will thus provide a reading of The Places We Live which emphasises it less as artistic innovation, and more as what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin called a 'remediation', because Bendiksen’s project promises to reform ‘our’ mediated encounter with the (urban) Other, and because it attempts to refashion older ways of mediating the urban poor.