ABSTRACT
Everybody has seen a documentary. The documentary is an important program format that has roots in photography and painting. If you think about it, the most fundamental urge we have is to record reality. Some 25,000 years ago in the south of France, Cro-Magnon man struggled to document the fauna of his world on the walls of caves. There are no portraits of the painters of those exquisite rock drawings. At the site of P ê ch Merle in France, there is, however, a prehistoric signature in the form of an outline of a human hand. The need to record ourselves in the form of an image is central to all cultures, whether on Greek pottery or temple friezes, Roman coins or Egyptian obelisks. The portrait is our most intimate documentary. For centuries, painters have been commissioned to create likenesses
of people for public display, for family, or for posterity. Much of this function has been assumed by photography since the latter half of the nineteenth century. We have a photograph of Abraham Lincoln. We only have paintings of George Washington. We take our own photographs of friends and family. In this respect, we are all documentarians. What is our objective? We want to record reality so that someone else can experience that moment either with us or without us at a later time.
