Documenting the Present

The “documentary turn” has often been mentioned in debates surrounding the art of the last two decades. Is it possible to describe the ways in which this turn has influenced contemporary photography? Hasn’t the influx of visual information that we consume on a daily basis somehow deviated from the use of documentary photography? How has our perception of documentary changed in the age of smartphones, social media, and youtube? Documentary often reemerges in art history in connection with an ongoing crisis – the activities of the Farm Security Administration and the great documentary wave which swept across art genres in the 1930s are two popular examples – but this could also be discussed in connection to the normalization in Czechoslovakia. Does this imply that documentary waves can be predicted based on observations of current social development?