Welcome to 2017! What a year lies ahead! More than ever, the documentary image matters. In a world saturated with images taken with billions of cell phones (mostly for social media) and images presented by artists, the media, and in advertising, it is the documentary image alone that stands apart. It is not fabricated, stylized, sentimentalized, photoshopped, or art directed. Instead a documentary image presents the visual facts by an artist with visual acuity and the verbal capacity to explain the necessary context. This is unique, and this should matter.

 

Each month, I have both the enviable and non-enviable task of selecting the featured photographer of the month. Enviable because I get to look closely at all the exhibits submitted to SDN during the previous month and award one with this distinction. Non-enviable because often it is difficult to decide between two, three, or four excellent choices and selecting only one, when in fact all deserve the award.

 

The task is always a balancing act of a handful of factors--visual acuity, technical execution, written communications, and documentary commitment. The subject is often the least important factor. A great visual story about a neighbor's dog will win over a poorly executed exhibit from Aleppo. But does this bring up a contradiction--implying that the neighbor's dog is more important than the plight of tens of thousands of citizens living in siege conditions? Hardly. But a good story about Fido will not only tell us about Fido, but will tell us something about the photographer, our neighbor, and most important, something about ourselves. A poor exhibit from Aleppo may not only not do any of that, it may also give us a sentimental, romantic, or horrific presentation of Aleppans when what they (and we) really need is accurate information, empathy, hope, respect, and dignity.

 

This does get complicated because at what point does the misery of the world just become the canvas for artists to fulfill their privileged aesthetic explorations. This is the last factor cited above--documentary integrity--a rather undefined term but something all documentary photographers strive for.

 

Gilles Mercier, this month's featured photographer, gets it right with his exhibit on hidden leper colonies in Romania. Each photograph is a complete visual statement both in seeing and in execution, he follows up with meaningful commentary about the larger issue and the specific subjects in his photos, and this is not the work of just one afternoon but rather over many years. This is documentary integrity.