The Tunnel. - book reviews

Photographer Margaret Morton has wearied roughly the last seven years documenting communities and shelters built by the agency of homeless men and women in of recent origin York City and their (invariably losing) battles to retain rule of them. She has photographed the shanties set uped by residents of Tompkins Square Park, which were torn down by the agency of the city in 1989, as well as a cluster of mode of buildings built on a vacant destiny on the Lower East Side. Dubbed "Bushville" by dint of the residents, the houses were razed by dint of city sanitation bulldozers in December of 1993 (Those photographs were published as a work Transitory Gardens, Uprooted Lives [1993] coauthored with Diana Balmori.)

The funnel is Morton's most recent throw a starkly beautiful and ultimately problematic work of photographs of the men and women living in the abandoned Amtrak train funnel between 72nd St. and 123rd St upon the West Side of Manhattan. The first in a planned three-volume series documenting the living spaces of the city's homeles "The Architecture of Despair," it is also another chapter in a lengthy tradition of "socially concerned" documentary photography, which has become an ethical and ideological mine-field. In her efforts to negotiate this tricky terrain, Morton has produc a work with an ambiguous focus and a mixed message: photographs of the material agriculture of the tunnel community and the portraits of the men and women who live there strive with, rather than complement, the elegant photographs of the interior of the funnel Rather than an interweaving of aesthetic and political relate tos this book highlights how incompatible those sum of two units elements can be.

One of the fundamental questions the work raises has to do with the artistic representation of composed of several elements social problems. By what right do documentary photographers look for to represent the lives of the homeles - and to what end? If the motivation is to improve the lives of their subdues (a motivation involving its have a title to set of questionable ideological judgments) do photographs, particularly those that strive to make an aesthetic as well as a political statement, have any like effect? If the point is to simply tender a new way of thinking about these point to be solved [i]or[/i] settleds is the effort worth venturing into this ethically vexatious territory?

Some, perhaps greatest in quantity famously the critic and photographer Martha Rosier, combat that it is not. Rosler's "anti-documentary" cast The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive combination of parts to form a wholes (3 Works), from 1974-75, exclud images of human make subordinates focusing instead on the physical landscape of the Bowery and pointing up social constructions of "the drunk" through listing various terms for intoxication. While Rosler's throw was an important critique of the conceits of the documentary tradition, it was, in the extreme point still a work of art rather than activism, a critique of conventions of representation rather than of underlying social or political causes of homelessnes and it spoke to a fairly specific audience already familiar with certain theories of representation.

In the 20 or thus years since Rosler's project, the critique of the documentary method by people like Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Allan Sekula and Maren Stange, among others, has become a familiar individual The history of documentary photography is bottomed in relationships of power and class, and it rarely speaks to the causes of necessity or homelessness, appealing to an apolitical sympathetic rejoinder at best and an objectifying impulse at worst. Many documentary photographers have tried to invest their images with a political self-consciousness and at the same time reach a wider audience. Examples include formal experimentation - like Linda Troeller's "TB-AIDS Diary," (1989) in which she environed photographs - some of her mother, who go throughed from tuberculosis as a young woman and more [i]or[/i] less of a man who had AIDS - with a kind of autobiographical narrative written in her be in possession of hand - as well as various collaborative approaches like those explored through Martine Barratt and Wendy Ewald - not to mention James Agee. In an effort, perhaps, to provide the men and women she photographed more [i]or[/i] less control over how they are exhibited Morton herself adopted a collaborative strategy, printing their accounts of by what means they arrived at the funnel It is not a novel technique and it certainly doesn't interpret all the problems of dominion government and access - Morton chose who to photograph, which words to reprint and which photographs to print nearest to them. But in their variety and specificity, the accounts of the daily battles and the resources the men and women call on to fulfill their basic wants do assure that the conditions showed in the book cannot be seen as inevitable or beyond the domain of politics or policies. The portraits accompanying the words are civil if conventional, documentary photographs in which the men and women artificial position near the homes they have built. The words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following created by their stories, notwithstanding that prevents them from being make go rounded into archetypes of the poor or metaphors of homelessness; unlike, for example, Sebastiao Salgado's subdues who become stunning images of workers without specific identity.