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Editing documentary - The Open College of the Arts

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Editing documentary


Here’s Miranda on the importance of editing in producing bodies of documentary work. And here are two quite different bodies of work.
The first, entitled Camden by French photographer Jean Christian Bourcart has no obvious structure.
The second, entitled Copia by American photographer Brian Ulrich has a clear structure. The issue he is examining is addressed by exploring three different but linked aspects of the issue (Retail/Thrift/Dark Stores).
Quite apart from the differences in subject matter, we would be interested to know if students think differences in approach influence the way they perceive the work.


Posted by author: Genevieve Sioka

15 thoughts on “Editing documentary

  • ‘… what you leave out, rather than what you put in…’ I’d have to think about your question first Gareth, because I’m now not quite sure how I approach work, and how things influence it, I think I might need to analyze that a bit.
    Interesting, and very, very suitable for what I’m going through at the moment. Thanks
    Dewald

    • As Sam Abell once said “you see, you feel, you photograph”. That’s surely a good way to approach work. Do we need to rationalise the act of taking photographs?

      • An interesting question Jose because it is clear that Ulrich has an analytical framework – this is imposed on the work in presentation. But presumably he developed it at some point in the ten years he spent pursuing the project. The ‘when’ and ‘how’ fascinate me. As you have pointed out before, for a lot of commissioned work the framework is developed before the photographer is selected. For personal work like this we do not know, but I doubt Ulrich had it mapped out ten years ago before taking a single shot.

        • As Ulrich tells it, the project started because he heard politicians saying that shopping was a patriotic act. After hearing G W Bush say “The vitality of our economy depends upon the willingness of Americans to spend…” he set out to see if people were in fact patriotic when shopping. He started gathering evidence by taking pictures of peopel shopping and that started a decade-long obsession. The things he was most interested in changed over the decade in a fairly organic way rather than as a predetermined plan.

  • Very difficult to decouple the content from the presentation. Considering Miranda’s point on editing I think the “Camden” edit – albeit with no discernible structure – and with a couple of shots that appear “out of narrative” tells a stronger immediate story; whereas I think the “Copia” series needs to have investment in the narrative. To put it another way the Camden set is a singular, quite narrow view of “a condition” of the USA from an outsiders perspective whereas the “Copia” series needs the viewer to be either an American or someone who has spent a good deal of time in America to get the sub-text.
    Both relevant, both work extremely well and neither give me any hope of redemption for the societal values they are portraying. And for me the “Camden” edit is vey good, including the directors, the “Copia” edit is very very good.

    • I would argue that you don’t need to be an American or have spent time in America to read into Camden and Copia. Both portfolios address a pan-Western dystopia created by excessive consumerism: Copia is essentially focus on abundance, Camden on the lack of it. And that’s something that we can all relate to and extrapolate into our own Western society, regardless of where we live. In my opinion that’s why these bodies of work are so powerful: they show something which is uncomfortably close to us.
      Structure? If there is one in these portfolios is certainly induced, artificial and created in editing. For me Camdem has the immediate, chaotic quality of a more faithful account of the photographer’s experience. It’s undiluted, raw, a kind of photographic ‘hot-potato’, as if the photographer were saying “there you are; you make sense of this if you can”.

      • My thought is that Camden didn’t need any investment in America by the viewer – these scenes could be anywhere in the world and still have the same impact – from the Gorbals to Sharpeville; structured or unstructured as there is nothing that pins this set to the USA. Whereas the Copia series focusses on the object and to a lesser extent the consumer. The sense of isolation of virtually every human in Copia’s echoes the marketeers strategy of divide and sell. Every part of the society, as portrayed, is at the surface, there is no depth and that is an American trait. That need for focus on the product is still almost uniquely North American (with the new China being a possible exception) and that’s why I felt that this series needed some comprehension of the “Great American Dream”.

  • I agree, the Camden set is apparently lacking in structure but nevertheless gives a very strong sense of place, and each shot is full of interest.
    Copia has a greater coherence – for example all the shots are from child’s eye view – but for me lacks impact, perhaps due to the familiarity of the subject matter. However, several of the shots individually and the whole set collectively did make me think about what children learn from these commercial environments.
    Very much worth a look!

  • I think it is worth asking if the apparent lack of structure in Camden is not deliberate. Does it not refer to the chaotic or at least structureless society that is being imaged? Is there not a post(-post?)-modern, post structuralist (if you are unsure of these terms try Googling them as there really isn’t enough room here for explanation) feel about the edit?

  • The main difference I noticed was that Camden seemed to make me perceive it from the perspective of someone involved with the place, with a personal emotional connection with it. more up close and personal involved with the reality of it. Whereas Copia had a distancing effect on me, it seemed quite dispassionate the people photographed do not make eye contact with the photographer – so that leaves you looking more dispassionately and disconnectedly. This ties in with the structure that is like a categorising and organising thing, that imposes a certain way of looking at the world as being made up of fixed things – I can’t think of the word off hand – its the human need to organise and categorise experience as though it was hierarchical. I should think that both of these approaches are to do with the view the photograher had of the projects they were undertaking, what they were wanting to say about the place/subject.

    • Absolutely. I would argue that both approaches belong to the same emotional continuum. As you said we have the bad habit of categorising perception and knowledge, setting artificial boundaries to realms of experience. Both bodies of work show emotional involvement, albeit of a very different degree. There is empathy in Candem, and a lack of it in Copia. They both press the same emotional button, in a way.

  • For me the essence of Camden and Copia was about similarity and difference. In fact, Bourcart writes how we tend to look for differences, although I was more aware of similarities here. I think one could go to any Town or City in the world and find people living that way and, indeed the same would happen if we went back 100, 200 or more years ago. There are always people who are going to be ‘at the bottom of the heap’ as it were because that seems to be intrinsic in social organisation of whatever kind. There is still warmth and kindness though which Bourcart remarks upon, that seems to be what surprised him because he went looking for danger. I guess I’m imposing my own order on his apparently unstructured presentation (taking Peter’s point about the edit).
    I don’t think you have to be American to read into Copia – it’s presenting consumerism to apparent excess.

  • I think both sets of work have their own structure and are telling using that to tell their story. Each style of presentation suits the story they set out to tell.
    I also think that the pictures we all take tell our own personal story too, through choice of subject matter and style. Ulrich writes that he doesn’t see the people in his pictures as the “other”. He grew up surrounded by shopping malls and wants things too. People mostly don’t look at the camera but that is not becaus ehe was hidden or suueptititious. He says that he worked in shops and malls by finding an interesting spot and waiting for people to come by. One thing he has commented on is that often people were so engrossed by the act of shopping that they didn’t see him – a man with a large camera standing in full view in front of them taking their picture. He found the whole experience of late 20th century consumerism fascinating, almost as an anthropological study.
    I agree with Catherine that you don’t need to be American to get Copia. 10 minutes in Argos (or worst of all – the Next sale) does it for me.

    • I reckon he was out there Eileen. Scenes reminiscent of the January sales. I noticed that Amazon.co.uk were trying to bring the concept of Black Friday to the UK last week.

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