A recent international photography project at NOVA Gallery in Minsk featured work by American Bill Crandall and the Czech photographer and documentarian Karel Cudlin (http://seeing-eye.photoscope.org ). Among Crandall's presentation were images of Belarus, Prague, the USA, and Yugoslavia. Karel Cudlin displayed images of the Czech Republic and life in Ukraine from both the Soviet and post-Soviet periods.

Crandall and Cudlin were keen to mingle with the crowd at the opening - coincidentally on September 11, 2001 -- and listen to the discussion. This was followed by other encounters in totally different photographic camps: with students at the Academy of Arts, with young members of a beginners' photography club, and with veteran members of the Minsk photography club.

Underpinning this project, which was funded by an ArtsLink grant, is an entire intercultural intrigue that can tell us a great deal about the nature of documentary photography as a significant element of today's world. The very name of the project - the 'Seeing Eye' - is a metaphor that restates the photographic endeavor of 'tracking' social reality. The exhibition's very different photographs shared a common documentary significance, each sending the viewer to a realm that evenly, endlessly extends across the planet, a realm we call daily life.

The metamorphoses of daily life

The very concept of everyday life was once unique for each of us, one of the inviolable privacies that naturally developed from the inherent limitations of our life cycle. We, as people, were once hopelessly imprisoned by our own experiences. Much has changed: we have long since become used to claiming as personal knowledge that which we have not ourselves witnessed, but heard or seen second-hand. The world has become more transparent visually and our private space, so personal and familiar, has not just expanded - it has lost all borders.

In this sense, the visual illustrations of information that the mass media present to us can be thought of as retrogressions: we already possess images of almost any course of events. Only the most incredible news demands verification by image. Photojournalists only compete to find those rare niches where visual verification of events is still needed. On the other hand, the amount of information, taken together with its increased technological quality, has prompted the modern generation of theoreticians to talk about the character of 'hyperreality' - the result of implanting another's visual world on our daily lives. We have fallen into the trap of 'image-ined' enlightenment. Now we can only mourn the lost paths to our own, once private, limited visual world, and the unique baggage of our own experiences, long since lost in the rampage of the technological revolution.

Where can we even begin to look for the line that once divided our own and others' experiences?

Between the real and the visual

A photographer, in capturing an event in the world, balances on the border between the real world and the virtual world of the visual. Photographic film records the traces of an event at the moment when the photographer stands one foot in the real world -- perhaps soaked in torrential rain, perhaps caught in the gaze of a lion or the blazing sun. An interrelated chain of cause and effect, tempered by culture, is launched: the photographer looks through the lens, and generates a photograph as a reflection of the world, a record of the world. But in perceiving the image, we see the photograph as a record of thought. What the photographer's eye sees will pass through cultural filters that transform the image from a physical record of specific information into a statement in the language of a specific culture. Even if we approach an image impartially and 'passively', we automatically decode the image and identify the subject in the way our culture has taught us.

This explains what happened at the opening of the 'Seeing Eye' exhibition and during the subsequent discussion. Some viewers sought - and found - a simply innovative new angle on the world. Some tried to interpret each individual photograph as a separate story, while others sought narrative continuity in the statements about the world that these photographers had produced - and this continuity manifested itself for those who sought it. But at this crossroads of differing expectations, the role of documentary photography and its appropriate context eluded definition; is this form of photography a reflective commentary, a message from its creator, a moment when time stood still, or something else?

This uncertainty brought home an uncomfortable truth behind the 'Seeing Eye' project: that the symbolism of Belarusian culture has no rich accumulation of the 'baggage' of self-examination. The practice of isolating and then rediscovering images of the self is poorly developed in Belarus; yet these are the skills that documentary photography teaches us and invites us to explore. Consequently, the documentation of a 'foreign' world seemed to hang in the air; discussions couldn't pass beyond the definition of documentary photography, or the degree of reality in unknown images seen through unknown eyes.

Many contested the notion that Belarus has no documentary photography. Speakers tried to prove the opposite by reference to their own, private experience - photographers they know, memorable shots - apparently not fully grasping that such evidence cannot disprove that the phenomenon of documentary photography is largely absent in Belarus culture.

Culture and the photography of culture

Visuality in the era we inhabit is subordinated by culture. This truth has long ceased to be a revelation, but documentary photography occupies a special place in this context. Cinema, television, news, music clips, etc. are visual sequences created with layers of intermediaries between the product and reality.

Regarding the photograph as record, the black-and-white progeny of the negative, whose apologists include Karel Cudlin and Bill Crandall, the intermediaries between the photographic shot and reality are restricted to the territory of the photographer's personal 'I', a territory transformed into a border zone. This 'I' is at the same time a carrier of the corresponding cultural codes, as a photographer is nothing if not a part of his own culture, a sensitive visual recorder of events.

It is commonly accepted that American culture is the main manufacturer and supplier of visual codes in the Western world today. Just as the market sweeps away other forms of exchange, its visual strategies of seeing gradually became the only legitimate ones and, therefore, universal. Crandall, like any American, lives in a world of established visual, verbal, ideologic and 'everyday' systems integrated into a symbolic model of the world. In this context, Crandall's visual statement about Belarus, a country which seems to want to turn back the clock and send the State back in time, seems like a challenge to measure oneself against a very different 'daily life'. The proposition that this different life is possible in reality can put in doubt the universality and coherence of one's own world. And to see that Belarus' reality exists in the world could be enough for Crandall to question the status of his own reality.

Factors behind documentation

Daily life in Belarus is unusual in presenting a different visual order, one clearly not conducive to the propagation of documentary photography as a cultural form of visual reflection. Documentation is generally accepted to be our robust link with the real. But Belarus is almost completely elusive in this regard; the concept of contemporary time, with its different speeds and inexorable forward motion, slips through the gaps of the photographic medium. In this sense, perhaps documentary photography about Belarus may exist (and there certainly is such a thing), but it does not speak in the language of thought. And it is not required as a witness of its time -- the children of today already have no difficulty discovering on the streets all that their parents saw at their age.

It is precisely due to the exhaustion of time and the absence of beginnings, the fruit of which have long since become rooted in neighboring countries, that the documentation of many of the photographs in Belarus does not develop into a language.

Pictures at an exhibition

The works of Karel Cudlin and Bill Crandall that were shown at the exhibition managed to unite interest in the 'private events' of daily life, in human life, like pearls cast over the planet. The pictures were free of extremes, of excesses and catastrophes; they spoke the language of the normal, the unassuming, the almost eventless world. Thus each sequence of photographic images made by each photographer added up to become the author's own and uniquely subjective view of privacy, commonplace existence, elevated to the status of a genre.

Karel Cudlin's photographs were full of sensitivity towards the marginal figures on society's edges, a group that in so many countries of the world includes gypsies. 'Their' weddings and funerals, 'their' children and old folk, 'their' men and women, together constitute the same familiar life, yet different. Our dependence on the conditions of our own existence suddenly emerges in these unfamiliar details and specifics.

Each fragment of daily life contains a range of values: in Cudlin's pictures of Soviet Army soldiers leaving Czech Republic, the images carry a very different statement than if these illustrated the mere daily life of soldiers. Through the fragmentation and intimacy of his pictures emerges a different degree of generality: it seems to refer us to those layers of our identity where all people see themselves as 'just people'.

Bill Crandall's photographs share an indirect, almost tangential, approach to the subject of each image. There is no direct message in the shots of streets in a modern Minsk suburb, or of the Belarus country landscape. He instead sends us an unfocused thought, which can be felt at the intersection of different parts of the picture, like in the stare of a man in Nazi uniform standing on a street in modern-day Prague.

The daily life that Crandall chooses to analyze is like a single cauldron. While Prague, Kosovo or Minsk are different, dispersed elements, the unmelted particles which the photograph remelts, he reorganizes them in his vision. Each picture becomes a microscene in a microtheater, where the leading roles are not necessarily objects or people brought into focus. Frequently it is our attention and involvement that complete the performance.

Perhaps documentary photography may still produce a language capable of speaking about Belarus' reality. Propagating the practice of documentary photography need not imply any massive effort - perhaps it will be enough to simply publish and publicize the contents of Belarus streets and the lives played out on them, to help understand how they relate to the real, non-Belarusian existence that lies beyond our 'daily life'.