Speculative Documentary
A photographic practice that adopts documentary conventions but builds its evidence and narrative, using fiction as speculative realism.
Speculative Documentary refers to photographic projects that adopt documentary formats while openly constructing scenes, narratives, or evidence-like artifacts to explore meanings that a purely factual record may flatten or stereotype. It rests on the premise that photographs are mediated constructions rather than objective transcriptions of reality, and that fiction can function as a mode of speculative realism: a way to approach difficult, sometimes unpalatable truths about human experience. When an intended situation cannot be found as-is in the world, the photographer may fabricate a reality that still aims for a felt sense of the real, offering a truth to be discerned within a complicated fiction rather than a claim to verifiable historical fact.
In practice, the work uses imaginative, often intricate strategies that blend familiar documentary styles with staged elements. Scenes may be built in advance as tableaux, or structured as elaborate hoaxes (the vrai-faux, or true-false) that exploit photography’s initial credibility to make viewers question what they accept as evidence. Such projects may mimic scientific or taxonomic documentation while remaining legible as photographs.
At its core, Speculative Documentary operates in a directorial mode, with the photographer constructing the scene rather than simply responding to it. It stands in tension with modernist "straight" purism that treats the photograph’s authority as grounded in an unmanipulated relationship between image and external reality. In critical writing, the term is often aligned with conceptual projects that deploy the rhetoric of proof—typologies, comparative series, and authoritative captions—to give fabricated scenes documentary force.