I don't think this is a typical outsider/insider piece, although there are other, familiar strands in Cole's discussion. To unpack a bit: Cole does not valorize based on pictorial merit or demerit. The title of the article is telltale: "A Too-Perfect Picture". One would expect such distinction to be an asset. Not here though. The pictures are "boring", astonishingly so to boot. It seems to me the choice of qualitative is not accidental. With it he signals his disinterest for that sort of picture (and, to be sure, he's criticizing the
sort of picture, not McCurry's pictures specifically, as they only serve as convenient examples). That may be of little interest to us - why should we care after all about what someone else is disinterested in - but above all he declares his departure from traditional aesthetic categories, e.g. "beauty" and other perennial favourites like "line", "proportion", etc. and the various technical ways to bring them about, as they may obscure or hide other, presumably murkier, agendas. In their place he advances a view of photographs as political vehicles, their real force and interest lying in the domain of ideology and the concomitant propaganda. In photography's past, the ideological burden of photographs has been especially prominent in the case of travel-documentary photographs (a striking example:
http://maa.cam.ac.uk/assemblingbodies/exhibition/measurement/anthropometric/ ). Despite their objective/documentary credentials, such photographs of foreign cultures promoted (so it is argued) colonial agendas where people are segregated by dint of physical distinction and cultural practice, while they were looked upon and scrutinized with the kind of fascination and illicit desire usually reserved for the exotic, the picturesque, and the erotic.
I sympathize with these background assumptions but had to wonder whether Cole starts with some limit cases from photography's past and then generalizes a little too broadly. When reading on documentary photography from the critical tradition Cole hails from, I sometimes get the feeling that photographs are not merely suspect of tacit ideology but also guilty of it, no matter what that ideology may be or the practice behind the making of the photographs. However, Cole's careful not to discriminate against the possibility of good documentary,
even from outsiders, (besides Singh, he cites M.E.Mark and - from cinema - Louis Malle), it's just that McCurry doesn't rise (in his opinion) to the standard of their achievement. On this, I agree with him, as well as with John's post #26.
My worry when I started reading the article was that it would taint further the practice of documentary photography. (I say "further" because documentary seems to me to be in the doldrums right now, esp. when compared to its glorious past.) I was wrong. If anything, Cole asks for more and "better" documentary, in the relevant qualified senses. I can't say I disagree with that.
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