Ejercicio Option B - 2 · Inglés PAU Castilla y León Ordinaria (Fase Mejora de Nota) 2021

OPTION B

PHOTOGRAPHING LIFE AS IT'S SEEN, NOT STAGED

Documentary photography, which fell out of favor with the rise of manipulated images, is making

a comeback, on view at the International Center of Photography.

According to legend, when the Roman Catholic Church forced Galileo to renounce his astronomical

proof that the earth revolves around the sun, he muttered, “But still, it turns.” For a group show at the ICP,

5 the photographer Paul Graham thought that would make an apt title. “He meant, ‘My observations of the

world still matter.’”

In recent years, documentary photography has fallen out of fashion. The critical arbiters in museums

and galleries favor pictures that are constructed in a studio, lifted off a computer screen, generated through

digital manipulation — anything other than shot outside the photographer’s door. But, as Graham says,

10 “The world matters — this is the core of photography, engaging with life.”

Although the photographs in the show were taken before the pandemic, they are being seen together

about a year after lockdowns began. “The name of the show took a different layer of meaning after Covid,”

Graham said. “The world goes on. When you look back at these pictures made pre-Covid, you realize, I

had it so good, the freedom to roam around and touch strangers, the ability to go into people’s houses. It

15 makes you realize, as photography can, the effortless beauty or unspoken flow that life has.”

The pictures were made by seven photographers. The American documentary tradition they are

revitalizing is not the politically charged movement of the 1930s, which exposed the hardships and

injustices in the country at that time, but the version that took hold among the leading street photographers

of the ’60s, and which the MOMA photography director John Szarkowski termed “New Documents.” As

20 Szarkowski wrote in the introduction to that 1967 show, “Their aim has been not to reform life but to know

it, not to persuade but to understand.”

More important, though, is what they share: a commitment to portray life as they discover it in the

world at large, without staging or manipulation; and by so doing, to find and express themselves. (Fragment

adapted from The New York Times.)

2) ARE THE FOLLOWING STATEMENTS TRUE OR FALSE? INDICATE THE LINES THAT SUPPORT YOUR ANSWER (1 POINT).

1.

Documentary photography has a lot to do with the manipulation of images.

TRUE

FALSE

2.

Most of the photographs in the show were taken after the pandemic.

TRUE

FALSE