Do you need to be an insider in order to produce a successful documentary project?

In her essay Inside/Out, Abigail Solomon-Godeau examines the different types of documentary photography by looking at the writings of Martha Rosler and Susan Sontag and the work of American photographers Diane Arbus, Nan Godin, Larry Clark and Robert Frank.

Looking first at the views of Sontag and Rosler, Solomon-Godeau writes:

Thus where Rosler sees the issue of photographic voyerism and objectification as a synecdoche of a larger political/cultural totality, Sontag tends to locate the problem in photography itself. Nevertheless, and despite the important difference between the nature of an ethical and a political critique, both Sontag and Rosler are equally aware of the probelmatic nature of the photographic representation of the other, whether that other is incarnated by the deviant, the freak, the wino, the poor, the racial or ethnic other – the list is obviously endless. And although the inside/out dichotomy for Sontag pivots on the possibility (or lack) of empathy and identification and where for Rosler it devolves on the issues of power and powerlessness, it is nonetheless significant that from either a humanist or left persepective the inside/outside couple is a central theme.

Inside/Out – Abigial Solomom-Godeau

Neither Sontag or Rosler offers a view on whether it is necessary to be an insider to produce a successful documentary project, although Solomon-Godeau describes Sontag as ‘withering’ about Diane Arbus whose work was shot from an outsider perspective.

Solomon-Godeau writes extensively about the works of Nan Goldin and Larry Clark, whose works The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and The Other Side, and Tulsa and Teenage Lust, respectively can be categorised as the work of insiders. Despite their status as insiders Solomon-Godeau questions the nature of the works stating:

As with Goldin’s work, however, the manifest insiderness of Clark’s position begs the question of the nature of such works’ reception and the nature of the viewing relationship between observer and subject.

Inside/Out – Abigial Solomom-Godeau

Solomon-Godeau does not write so extensively about ‘outsider’ photographers but she does discuss Robert Frank’s work The Americans. Solomon-Godeau high-lights Frank’s status as a Swiss émigré which reinforced his outsider status. However, Solomon-Godeau does not think that his staus as an outsider made his work more objective that Goldin’s or Clark’s, stating:

Still, to say that The Americans is not the truth of American in the 1950s is not say that it does not possess a truth….

Inside/Out – Abigial Solomom-Godeau

Ultimately Solomon-Godeau does not present either insider or outsider as being more objective.

So in answer to the question do you need to be an insider to produce a successful documentary project, I believe the answer is no. As an insider you have greater access and can show greater empathy or sympathy but as an outsider it is possbile to be more, but not totally, objective.

Sources

Photopedagogycom. 2019. PhotoPedagogy. [Online]. [21 July 2019]. Available from: https://www.photopedagogy.com/insideout.html