Social Media and Documentary Photography

Abstract

In recent decades, one can observe a crisis in documentary photography with a spreading distrust regarding the truth claim and indexicality of photography and major skepticism about its ability to depict reality with relative objectivity. In response several attempts have been made, in both theory and practice, to resolve or overcome such a crisis. One of these attempts is Mette Sandbye’s introduction of her conception - New Mixtures. This conception describes a new form of documentary that goes beyond the traditional approaches and is more socially and politically engaged by utilizing various genres and mediums. In this essay, I will attempt to depict that this idea has been developing in practice with the simultaneous growth of technology and social media documentary. Using case studies this paper will attempt to portray how, by combining these two developments together, the resulting method could provide us with a new form of documentary that relies on using any available resource, medium and genre available to document an event in a holistic, neutral way.