ABSTRACT
Everybody has seen a documentary. This important program format has roots in photography and painting. The most fundamental urge we have as humans is to record both the world we see and our own existence. Some 25,000-30,000 years ago in the south of France, Cro-Magnon man struggled to document the fauna of his world by painting on the walls of caves. There are no portraits of the painters of those exquisite rock drawings. At the site of Pêch Merle in France, and at many other cave sites, there are prehistoric signatures 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, family, or posterity. Since the latter half of the nineteenth century, photography has progressively taken over from painting. We have a photograph of Abraham Lincoln. We only have paintings of George Washington. Now a wider public has access to portraiture through photography. 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 it at a later time. Today, we share digital photos immediately with friends and family via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and so on. We want witnesses that we were here; we want to document that we were here; and we want those documents to be acknowledged.
