But now that they qualify as historical photographs, they serve a different function: as documentary evidence of a city changing so rapidly that its residents could barely chart the transformation.
Often blurring the line between real and invented, Katrina dramas necessarily function as documentaries.
These two arresting images put the process of photography front and center, even as they undermine the medium's historical, documentary function.
More important, though, is their documentary function, as records of art that either no longer exists, or exists only as ruins, or as ideas never realized.
The results function in a documentary capacity, but also provide insights into the students' social understandings of the built environment, which, in the context of architectural teaching and learning, has value for both students and instructors.
At just over four hours, At Berkeley almost ceases to function as a documentary in the normal sense and becomes something nearer to an archive resource, or an audio-visual database.
Its premise is to examine the inventive ways in which photography has been incorporated into contemporary art, losing its documentary function and shaping hybrid versions of reality in which fact and fantasy blend.
From the simple tape splice to the more recent cutting and pasting of digital audio, the ability to edit gave rise to a "record consciousness," an approach that sought to move beyond the simple documentary function of the recording studio to exploit its potential for composition and experimentation.
Libraries, hit hard by the explosion in access fees for scientific publications, were among the first to be aware of the danger that the infernal merry-go-round of prohibitive subscription costs and closing strategies of specialized publishers would the freedom of research and the exercise of the documentary function.
We take pictures because we retain an implicit faith in the camera's documentary function.
