A photo documentary is a literary work that is hard to define. One might say that it is an essay that uses photographs to illustrate a point that the author is trying to stress. While others might describe a photo documentary as a literary work that uses words and writing to stress the importance or significance of the photos. Either way you look at it as the bottom line that photos and text work together to bring about the final results. As Coles explains that collecting documentary work is like writing a work of fiction. He emphasizes the fact that the documentary work is a rendering and representing of an event, and not necessarily the actual or the whole truth. He also states how the author of such documentation has the control over the way event is portrayed and how each individual person is influenced by the way the authors presents their message. I think that the truthfulness of documentary work is based on the documenter and what they feel is the truth. They may choose to simply add or remove the entire details.
In Robert Coles essay, he points out that, "All documentation is put together by a particular mind whose capacities, interests, values, conjectures, suppositions, and presuppositions, whose memories, and, not least, whose talents will come to bear directly or indirectly on what it is"(Coles p.177). Coles also states that filtration is a natural part of documentary work and should not be taken so harshly. He explains that subjectivity should be expected in a documentary and the viewers should understand it. Coles also reveals how Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans edited and cropped their images to produce a desired effect, and raises the question of authenticity versus manipulation. .
The photograph of the woman and her two children with their faces away from the camera, not being able to see all their faces, Coles says, "she decided upon a photograph that allows us to move from well-meant compassion to a sense of respect, even awe: we see a stoic dignity, a thoughtfulness whose compelling survival under such circumstances is itself something to ponder, something to find arresting, even miraculous" (Coles p.
