A Medium Seen Otherwise

Abstract

Abstract:This article examines the innovative incorporation of photography into documentary film, exploring the various ways this specific manifestation of intermediality permits us to see both photography and documentary film otherwise. Photographs, whether professional or vernacular, are conventionally understood to furnish documentaries with indexical evidence and visual illustration of history, yet the spatiotemporal and aural dimensions of film permit documentaries to illuminate photography’s wider capacities beyond the merely representational. This essay argues that film can document more effectively than other media what people do with analog and digital photographs as material objects that enable various forms of social and political relationality through multisensory experience. Moreover, film can bring the event of photography into fuller view, demonstrating how no single participant (photographer, subject, camera, photograph, or viewer) has sovereignty over its affect, meaning, or value.