First, allow me to provide a clarification. The following is not going to be about Matthew Brady. The photography of Matthew Brady is a concrete instance of brilliant work in the documentary mode. The real question is: can purely documentary work be art?

Why does it matter? Whatever title these works are given, they are clearly effective in their own right. No art created in Brady’s nation and during his lifetime has become so ubiquitous or so iconic. Nor has any historical document of that period, with the possible exception of the Gettysburg Address, been so fundamentally linked to the events surrounding it. However, the title of art changes the nature of Brady’s work. Without lessening its connection to its time and place, it transcends the boundaries inherent to that connection. It renders Brady’s work eternal, like the Iliad or Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade, both of which present an image of a particular historical event that has resonated for centuries with individuals far outside of that event’s influence. The title of art makes a work part of a canon, worthy of being honored for reasons proceeding beyond its topical references or ideological impact.

That distinction has always been the stumbling point for including documentary works in the artistic canon. Works that attempt simply to record specific events inherently lack one crucial element of art, and may lack another. The former, the creative spark or genius that defined the Western conception of art from the Enlightenment to the advent of the 20th century, must be at least recontextualized where documentary works are concerned. The latter, a resonance with the audience regardless of their temporal situation, is a more complex and interesting question where documentary works are concerned.

Leaving aside Romantic notions of the mystical nature of human creativity, it remains unquestionable that human ingenuity is inherent to the creation of art. The distinction between art and beauty is in the act of creation, the use of human faculties to create the object observed. A sunset is not art, because it exists due to the forces of nature, rather than the intention of humans. Likewise, the work of Duchamp may not be conventionally beautiful, but it is art, because of the will that created it and the impact it has on its viewers. To discern this quality in documentary work requires nothing more than a slight adjustment of perspective. Particularly in this era of allusion and collage, the idea of artist as Pygmalion bringing forth beauty from nothingness is obsolete. The distinction between a documentary filmmaker ordering weeks of footage taken in the field into a powerful and coherent two-hour statement, and a poet ordering pre-existing words into a reflection on mortality, is predicated on snobbery, not quality.

So that leaves the most fundamental test of a work yet to be performed. The effect a work has on its audience determines its nature. If its nature is to inform, it is a lesson; to deceive, fraud; to inflame, propaganda. Most importantly, if a work’s nature is to elevate its audience, it is art. In this respect, it is important to identify what a work’s nature is not. Nature is not purpose; any number of works have aimed at transcendence and missed. Nor is nature purely hearsay; Coleridge’s essays on Shakespeare are marvels in their own right, but cannot take the place of Hamlet or Lear. Nature is not even strictly experience, for the surroundings of a work may influence its perception. Music sounds sweeter when heard with a lover, as many greater minds have expressed. No, the nature of a work reveals itself over time and through both its own statements and those of the people it has changed.

As I have said, Coleridge’s criticisms cannot replace Shakespeare, but to see what Coleridge saw in Shakespeare enriches the experience. Documentary art, for so I can now comfortably call it, can move and elevate the viewer to no less an extent than any other genre. The strangeness of Decasia is no less affecting than that of Dali, nor is the empathic horror of Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives different in nature from Crane’s Maggie or Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. The photography of Matthew Brady involves the viewer in the horror of war and the grief of those left bereft by it to an extent shared by masterworks like Guernica, All Quiet on the Western Front and Apocalypse Now. As with all art, it attains its position in the canon not due to its physical construction, but its aesthetic nature.