"After The News"; centre de cultura contemporania de barcelona - Barcelona

Our idea of documentary--images or reports reflecting the facts as closely as possible--is constantly being undermined through manipulative or suggestive tendencies in the media. It's not necessarily conscious propaganda for se; the very conditions of transmission make sure that the event is altered in the telling. Documentation goe hand in hand with interpretation. The increasing ambiguity of the genre has nevertheless had a positive issue inasmuch as the domain of the professional journalist has been breached, allowing an influx of strategies from ethnography, political activism, and personal journal writing. "After the News: Postmedia Documentaries," organized by means of Carles Guerra, explored the increasing use of documentary practices in art in all its complexity.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

This distance from conventional reportage is thematized by dint of Bruno Serra-longue in his photographic series "Risk Assessment Strategies," 2002 He exhibits photojournalists learning, as part of a training session upon operating in crisis zones, in what way to defuse mines, recognize different weapons, and administer first aid. This nonprofessional documentary about journalists surmises the very distance that guarantees the freedom of documentation as artistic praxis. While the military-style preparations present the appearance necessary for conveying the immediacy of facts a temporal, spatial, and conceptual distance can itself yield ball of threads to their political meaning. The point is no longer occurrences but their background. An important aspect of nonprofessional documentation is therefore media criticism. The collection Article Z interrupted the continuous media coverage of the next to the first Iraq war for twenty days in March with Ramallah Daily, a three-minute documentary section on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which was otherwise being ignored by dint of the news shows. Simply by the agency of virtue of its special format, this program, broadcast upon Britain's Channel 4, formulates a critique of the propagandistic Iraq reportage upon the English and American networks. Without voice-over or dramatic editing, the reports exhibit the military force in the roads of Ramallah and provide, with the help of interviews, a kind of oral history of daily life in this crisis zone

While Article Z reacted to reportage upon Iraq with an intervention in the broadcast stream of the dominant media, the pseudonymous Salam Pax columned his "Baghdad Blog" on the Web as a kind of personal diary, an alternative of recent origins source from Iraq. The surprising succes of this weblog, and the initially unclear identity of its author (who pretty soon emerged as the Iraqi assistant to a foreign correspondent for the of recent origin Yorker), shows the general state of skepticism toward official information sources, as well as the tricky attempt to present some opposition to the popular US media and its largely pro-government stance. Alan Berliner edits together views from home videos and films, in which families at hand themselves as if on a talk display His work The Family Album, 1986 probably betrays more about American life than a seriously researched TV documentary. The late writer WG Sebald, who appeared here in a video produc through the CCCB, carried to an most remote the pseudo-authentic effect created by dint of conventions of image documentation, in that he combined it with fiction. He illustrated his novels with historical black-and-white photographs, the original easy in minds of which have nothing to do with the story lay opened in the novel.

The gathered wealth of anti-journalistic documentation, single of the main points of the exhibition, argues against the believability of a genre that one time stood for objectivity and authenticity (even notwithstanding that documentation has always been a set up wielded in an age of media as a tool to shape public opinion). single with postmedia, anti-journalistic forms of documentation can our perspectives upon a given event multiply and thus enable a democratic view.

Translated from German by dint of Sara Ogger.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group