Documentary Photography

Alex Majoli. Iraq. War. 2003. American soldiers playing football. Magnum photos. LON44874. ArtStor. 

Documentary photography means a lot of different things to me, or at least evokes the most emotions. It seems to include photographs of ordinary situations during extraordinary times, or of things that would only be happening because of unordinary life- and world-changing events. I'm usually struck more by black and white photography than color, but chose this image because my boyfriend has deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan and I can't seem to get enough images of the deployed lives of contemporary soldiers. My initial reaction was that they were probably playing soccer, but then because of the two men on the right hand side, one in the foreground and one in the middle ground, who seem to be ducking, along with the kicked-up dust, I thought it might be and image of a mortar attack. I like that documentary photographs are so fleeting and open to interpretation. Even if they have been framed in a certain way to capture a certain moment or feeling, they encourage us to think of everything else going on to have put people in the photographed situations in the first place.