Since the mid-1990s, artists have explored the status of documentary reference and the material trace in the gallery with increasing frequency. In part, this line of investigation stems from a situation in which the power of documentary images has been met with a widespread cultural uncertainty about their trustworthiness. As Hito Steyerl and Maria Lind write: ‘The double bind is strong: on the one hand documentary images are more powerful than ever. On the other hand, we have less and less trust in documentary representations’ (2008: 1). In response to this uncertainty, artists and filmmakers alike have turned increasingly to playful structures that challenge the traditional documentary modes that Bill Nichols has described as ‘discourses of sobriety’, those that ‘regard their relation to the real as direct, immediate, and transparent’ and are ‘seldom receptive to “make-believe” characters, events, or entire worlds’ (Nichols 1992: 3–4). Elsewhere, I have described this trend as a ‘speculative’ form of documentary, one that challenges sobriety, in that it utilises experimental modes to speculate about the line between fiction and non-fiction, employing structures like ironic framing, fantasy, imaginative reenactment, lyrical interpretation, invented characters, fake documents, experimental animation and the creative deployment of found footage (Takahashi 2011). While many critics have attributed this recent explosion of speculation in the arts to epistemological anxiety spurred on by the proliferation of digital media, I should point out that such experiments with documentary, mockumentary and overt fakery are part of a long tradition within documentary cinema. What, then, is at the root of artists’ recent documentary investigations of the material trace?

Speculative forms of documentary art open up room for independent critique by emphasising not only the uncertain boundary between fiction and fact, but the indefinite margin between evidence and affect housed in the material traces of traumatic historical events. In the mid-1990s, artists’ interest in the status of documentary evidence coincided with the digital image's supposed loss of photographic indexicality as a guarantee of presence. While anxiety about the ontological differences between digital and chemically developed photographs and film alike has largely dissipated, the material trace continues to have an uncertain, even paradoxical status in the work of many contemporary artists. These documentary artists frequently interrogate the authenticity of found objects and analogue image technologies like 8mm celluloid reels, chemically developed contact sheets and family photos.