Does Documenting an Event Still Need Photography?

A phone video shows more of an event than any photograph. But a photograph is what stays with us, and that says something about what photography has always been for.

Documenting reality today increasingly happens without photographs: video has become a more suitable medium for showing what is happening. The question is not new, but it is worth asking again now, when there is too much of everything to look at and a growing share of it was generated rather than recorded. Shouldn't the documentary function of photography now be discussed in direct comparison with video?

This comparison does not involve directed video or cinematic language. It refers to raw eyewitness footage. Whoever was there was holding the camera. And even a short video gives you more than a photograph. You see what happens, not one moment of it.

Photography works by choosing. Context can change radically depending on what enters the image and what stays outside it. A photograph does not show an event as it goes on; it offers a view of the event, already formed and held still.

Eyewitness video is framed and selected too, and open to manipulation: it can be cut, reframed, excerpted, distorted through sequencing or through where it ends up circulating. The difference is in what it records beyond the single frame: how one moment follows another, how the viewpoint shifts, what people do while the camera keeps working.

The roughness of that footage has stopped reading as error. A bad angle, a shaking frame, bad sound now say that whoever held the camera was inside the event, and being close has become the thing we trust. Careful work says the opposite. Something made well begins to look like something made for a purpose, or even generated.

Set against that video, documentary photography is made well. It rarely aims at a neutral account: it works by directing feeling, and that is where its power comes from. It is also what moves it toward artistic statement and weakens its claim to honesty toward an event as it unfolds. The aim of a good documentary photograph is to strengthen the event, so that those who are far away and outside the context feel it the way the photographer standing there felt it.

Both photographs and videos can become iconic, in different ways. A photograph compresses an event into one still image and provokes an immediate reaction, and that image can come to hold everything that happened that day. A video becomes memorable through movement and repeated viewing, and that takes time. News works with one showing, a couple of seconds of contact, and this is part of why the front page of an online outlet is still held by a photograph rather than a video.

Even a video has a frame pulled out of it, and that frame is what makes you click play. Until you do, it is being used the way a photograph is used, working on impact alone.

But photography did not come by that position through its contribution to social reform, humanism, and visual ethics alone. For much of its history, it was the most practical and widely distributed way to record an event, and belief in photographic honesty could be cultivated by the picture agencies precisely because professional photography occupied that position so securely.

With smartphones, almost anyone is a possible witness. The recording now starts inside the event, from whoever happens to be standing there, and no profession owns it.

A single image is still the easier thing to handle. It can be picked, captioned, hung, printed, placed in a sequence. A long recording resists all of that and asks for time. This is why editors and archives and galleries keep reaching for photographs.

Is photography still necessary for documenting events? It is not that a photograph can no longer serve as a document. The question is how fully and how precisely it documents, and whether documenting still depends on it. Photographs are still offered in support of what happened, and being a work does not release an image from that. If it turns out that documenting no longer depends on photography, that is no loss: it frees the medium from a job it took on because no one else could do it.

And it was never quite doing that job. A photograph was never the record of an event. It was the event made into something that could be felt at a distance, by people who were not there. For much of photography's history, that was close enough to a record because few alternatives could match its practicality and reach. Video is the comparison, and what it shows is not that photography has failed at documenting. It shows what photography was doing instead.

Manipulation in photography is not a flaw. It is how the medium works. The photographer chooses the moment, the frame, and the lens, and the lens alone decides a great deal: the same number of people can read as a dense crowd or as a few scattered passers-by, depending on the focal length and where he stands, since a long lens used from a distance creates the effect of a crowd while a wide one used from close up spreads them across the frame. Nobody has lied. Then the editor chooses which of the hundred frames is the one we see. And we know this. We look at a photograph knowing that someone picked this angle for us, and we look anyway.

A photograph of a city. Then hours on Google Maps, walking its streets with a cursor. Then a live walk video, someone carrying a camera down the same street in real time. Then finally being there. Four ways of knowing the same place.

So yes. More data makes a fuller document. But we do not remember data. What stays with us is emotion, and the concentrated emotion of a photograph is simply easier to remember.