dust storm, but rather in high winds, and that the
family, deliberately staggered out by Rothstein,
was not approaching their home for protection,
but rather a tool shack, accusations of propaganda
and deception erupted. Rothstein later defended
himself with an essay entitled ‘‘Direction in the
Picture Story’’ (1942), in which he claimed that
slight manipulation and staging were acceptable if
they best allowed the photographer to portray the
underlying truth of a situation—in this case, the
Dust Bowl’s hostility toward human inhabitation
and the Depression’s divisive impact on family
cohesion. Yet today, documentary photography
generally continues to cast a suspicious eye on the
kind of intervention Rothstein proposed; it is other
types of photographic work that have come to fully
embrace the use of manipulated surfaces as an
appropriate means of social representation.
Debates about the authenticity of representation
and an acknowledgment that the camera imposes
its own morphology between viewers and reality—
in other words, that photographs, rather than pro-
viding slices of the world as it is, result from com-
plex decisions on the part of all those involved in
their taking, distribution, and reception—even-
tually contributed to a retreat from overtly politi-
cal-reformist projects after World War II. Rejecting
the hierarchy of importance between weighty his-
torical events and everyday occurrences, even
between fact and appearance, photographers in
larger numbers began training their cameras onto
quotidian subjects to inform, without necessarily
advocating a particular model of social change.
Robert Frank’sThe Americans(1958/1959) offered
a bleak look at the spiritual emptiness of postwar
American life, and its often blurred, grainy images
lent evidence not only to the book’s underlying
themes of human isolation and fragmentation but
also to a new photographic vision aware of its
interpretive limits—here, the ‘‘real’’ no longer
poses as an unmediated truth.
Others of Frank’s contemporaries, recognizing
the sometimes debilitating power dynamics in
play when photographers merely step into their
subjects’ lives for the short time period it takes to
capture a few ‘‘scenes’’ on film (not to mention
those resulting from differences in social standing),
chose to work in series, photographing the same
group of people over many months or years. Bruce
Davidson spent the spring of 1959 following mem-
bers of a Brooklyn teen gang called the Jokers,
while Larry Clark’sTulsa (1971) chronicled his
experiences as a participant-observer with a group
of drug users in Oklahoma. More recently, Chan-
dra McCormick’s Glendel Plantation Sugar Cane
series and her ongoing work on life in black New
Orleans neighborhoods depict communities the
photographer has become well acquainted with
through long-term immersion.
These developments should not suggest the com-
plete absence of photographic projects specifically
dedicated to social change in the past half century,
however. The work of Fazal Sheikh, for example,
illustrates the political project’s continuing rele-
vance in documentary, as well as the major shifts
in approach that have come out of recent debates in
cultural studies and photography theory and that
are concerned with issues of power and representa-
tion.A Camel for the Son(2001), the first in a varied
series of publications and exhibitions addressing
international human rights issues, focuses on the
fate of Somali women living in refugee camps
along the northern Kenyan border. Like some of
his predecessors (especially from the 1930s), Sheikh
supplements his visual records with written texts;
yet unlike the former, he attempts to give some of
the authorial voice over to the photographed sub-
jects themselves through the inclusion of their let-
ters or of stories told in their own words. Sheikh
foregoes images that capture people in the context
of their daily lives for more formal portraits. Keep-
ing a respectful distance, he lets his sitters position
themselves for the camera before plain back-
grounds, emphasizing the always already staged
conditions of all representation by refusing to crop
stray shoes from the frame or by including pictures
slightly blurred by unanticipated movement in the
final publication. In a further effort to evade the
essentializing character of so many descriptions of
social Others, Sheikh’s captions identify his subjects
by name—the potential designation ‘‘African
woman with malnourished child’’ becomes Sheikh’s
image titleFatuma Abdul Rahman and Her Daugh-
ter Amina.
Undertakings like Sheikh’s make clear that even
the most genuine efforts at cross-cultural under-
standing and immersion cannot altogether counter-
balance the status of an outsider regarding a
community from a privileged position, the power
dynamics such a situation entails, and the kind of
work that can ultimately derive from it. Members
of a group may also present themselves differently
to their peers than to external observers, not all of
whom, in turn, will succeed at fully shaking the
preconceived notions they bring to their projects.
To many present-day thinkers, insider photogra-
phy—camera documents created by a member of
the depicted group—thus promises greater authen-
ticity of representation, especially in regard to the
portrayal of marginalized communities.SOCIAL REPRESENTATION