What is the most important attribute of a documentarian?

Respect? Empathy? An unsentimental, if not occasionally brutal, honesty?

Ed Kashi – “A Period in Time: Looking Back While Moving Forward”
Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, 2025
Review by W. Scott Olsen

To be a documentarian is to capture some essence of humanity, not only for present understanding, but for the insight that perspective brings. A documentarian has, in the back of his or her mind, before stepping outside the door, a kind of intent toward longevity which informs every level of their work.

And for work, we assume holds a disinterested stance, what is the role of an artistic eye or approach? Is the documentarian allowed to have an artistic eye, a creative talent? Speaking photographically, when do such things as motion blur or soft focus become not only acceptable but necessary to convey something a bit more true about a situation?

To my mind, the documentarian is a distillation of nearly every other type of photography. Yes, it requires clarity, but it also requires a point of view. Yes, it requires a lack of bias but also an artistic ability to present an image in a way that carries gravitas, ethos, and sometimes pathos.

And just to be clear, I am making a distinction between the photo-documentarian and the daily photojournalist, although one group clearly includes the other. Few newspapers, however, will run images with light streaks and blur. The artistic palette board holds more options for the photo-documentarian.

I’m thinking of this because I have on my desk today a profound and remarkable and important book: A Period in Time: Looking Back While Moving Forward, by Ed Kashi. The book is a retrospective of Kashi’s more than 40-year career as a photojournalist and documentarian. The book is an anthology of still images, both color and black and white (note: Kashi is also famous for his work incorporating multimedia into visual storytelling), and this book should be on every photographer’s table.

Actually, it should be on everyone’s table, regardless of what they may do.

In a preface, Don Carlson, Executive Director of the Briscoe Center for American History, begins with a quote by Kashi himself—

“Photographic archives are repositories of possibilities.”

That idea, just by itself, is mesmerizing. Carlton follows this by writing—

Visual storyteller and photojournalist Ed Kashi’s statement about photographic collections serving as “repositories of possibilities,” is an eloquent observation that an archive of photographic images can have the potential of being not merely a stagnant repository, but a dynamic way for images from the past to bear witness. Such an archive provides us with opportunities to look deeper at the world around us—as it has been, as it is now, and how it might be in the future.

This is an insightful opening to this collection, and dead-on true. A Period in Time begins with a section called “Early Works,” which holds images from 1977 to 1983, and throughout the book, there are sections demarcated by time. Each section begins with a small introduction about what Kashi was doing, what was going on in the world, and why he was there. Occasionally, there are short journal entries called Dispatches, which give a more personal look into Kashi’s heart and mind.

Long experience, taken as a whole, is a step toward perspective, and the result, in this book, is a feeling of Gestalt wisdom.

Kashi traveled the world in his career.  Northern Ireland, Vietnam, the Niger Delta, India, the Middle East, the Americas, and elsewhere found focus in his lens. And in every section of this book, his images articulate a situation, a quality of living, the nuances of everyday life. His work, as Kashi himself describes, is images of candid intimacy.

Going back to the idea of repositories of possibilities, what this collection asks is: How was this possible? Why was this possible? When was this possible? Who made this possible?

The answers matter to us today.

In his own introduction, talking about his origins as a photographer, Kashi writes—

This form of expression [documentary photography], synthesized everything I cared about in life at that point, storytelling, art, journalism, connecting with people in need, and having the freedom to engage with the world and satisfy my curiosity. I had found my vocation. My calling. My life would be unrecognizable if I had done anything else.

A retrospective is sometimes an opportunity to celebrate an artist’s work. It is pleasant to listen to the old Rolling Stones, to look at the scope of Monet, to revisit Martha Graham. But I would argue a photographic retrospective like A Period in Time is a great deal more. It is a commentary upon the past, yes, but also a commentary upon the present, our ability to change or not, upon the implications the inertia of the past throws at the future.

A Period in Time is a big book and a heavy one, and yet I find it often in my lap. Sometimes I’m not turning pages at all because an individual image has arrested my imagination. It is impossible to look at any of the images of these books and not have a dual understanding. This is what it was like then. What does this mean for what it’s like now? Sometimes the distance between then and now is great. Sometimes it’s no distance at all. But every image here informs not only the present moment, but my understanding and thus participation in the present moment.

Kashi’s work captures an honesty and a vibrancy that make every page a narrative. The images are oftentimes hard, oftentimes politically or personally complicated, if not disturbing. But they are not indictments as much as they are revelations.

A Period in Time, which is really several periods in time, I have come to understand, is a retrospective, which really means now. Look at where we have been. But pay attention to the looking. You can feel now in the air. Through art and honesty, the past has been preserved so that this very afternoon can quiver.

A note from FRAMES: Please let us know if you have an upcoming or recently published photography book.