Response to In, Around, and Afterthoughts

This article kind of made me loose all my trust and interest in documentary artwork. It took a very negative look at this art form. I always thought of documentary as going out in the world and showing what is going on truthfully, but now I realize thats an impossible task. That means documentary is just for entertainment sake, "Documentary testifies, finally, to the bravery or (dare we name it?) the manipulativeness and savvy of the photographer, who entered a situation of physical danger, social restrictedness, human decay, or combinations of these and saved us the trouble" (180). This goes on to talk about how the photographer creates artwork to entertain the viewer, and then talks about the photo of the man and boy on a bike in paris with berets on a bicycle with baguettes tied to the back on the tree lined streets of paris. This image was completely staged by the artists using his driver and the driver's nephew. This image was used to advertise for tourism for France. The thing is, when I saw this image originally I really thought how nice it looked and how nice it must be to go to France, now I find out that if I did go to France it would be impossible to find a scene like this since it was all staged. This image was then recreated to be used in a Visa advertisement. This makes me so angry, I know not to trust everything I see, but I thought I could trust the documentary art form to show the truth. Later this article talks about how the people in the images will many times live in trailers and never see a dime for their photo, but at the same time the artist makes thousands of dollars from one picture that is reproduced and put up everywhere. There are many times that documentaries can actually hurt the subject. The mud-men for example have lost much of their cultural independence, they used to wear their masks to scare away their enemies, but now they wear them to attract tourism. After reading this article I feel cheated in a lot of what I thought was true, I don't see the good in banking on someone else's pain.