INTERPRETATION

Oleg Nikishin

Concept: Documentary photo as a construct of many interpretations

What is a documentary photograph? It is a construct. A photography which is not a construct, which is precise and most objective is the one that is made by the surveillance cameras. As soon as a photographer arrives on the scene the world he carries in himself arrives too. He interacts with the scene and changes the environment by his very presence. The most blessed of the places are those where people are not aware of the influence a photograph  might have. And they do not try to hide what’s going on as soon as the photographer arrives on the scene. Those shots one is still able to make in Afghanistan are now impossible, say, in Chechnya where people immediately imagine the glossy magazines and news-papers  those shots will be published in. Thus people in front of the camera start reinterpreting their reality for the benefit of the image. On the other hand that which seems objective even to photographer himself can be drastically reinterpreted on the other side of the perception. By his audience. The interpretation of the image depends not only on the one who makes the photo, or who finds himself within the photo, but also on the one who looks at it. Therefore the captions are very important. One and the same shot of the effects of the war conflict can acquire opposite meanings depending on which side of the conflict the spectator supports, or the background he has. Often the images find themselves in the ready-made niches of our consciousness and to extract them from there, to give them a new mental trajectory one needs to do some explaining. A photograph is a complex object which reflects the person who made it, the openness or closure of the environment for photographing and a mirror image of a person looking at it.