Documentary photography

Documentary photography usually refers to a popular form of photography used to chronicle both significant and relevant to history and historical events and everyday life. It is typically covered in professional photojournalism, or real life reportage, but it may also be an amateur, artistic, or academic pursuit.

History

Bandit's Roost (1914) by Jacob Riis

The term document applied to photography antedates the mode or genre itself. Photographs meant to accurately describe otherwise unknown, hidden, forbidden, or difficult-to-access places or circumstances. The earliest daguerreotype and calotype "surveys" of the ruins of the Near East, Egypt, and the American wilderness areas. Nineteenth century archaeologist John Beasly Greene, for example, traveled to Nubia in the early 1850s to photograph the major ruins of the region; One early documentation project was the French Missions Heliographiques organized by the official Commission des Monuments historiques to develop an archive of France's rapidly disappearing architectural and human heritage; the project included such photographic luminaries as Henri Le Secq, Edouard Denis Baldus, and Gustave Le Gray.

In the United States, photographs tracing the progress of the American Civil War (1861-1865) by photographers for at least three consortia of photographic publisher-distributors, most notably Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner, resulted in a major archive of photographs ranging from dry records of battle sites to harrowing images of the dead by Timothy O'Sullivan and evocative images by George N. Barnard. A huge body of photography of the vast regions of the Great West was produced by official government photographers for the Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories (a predecessor of the USGS), during the period 1868–1878, including most notably the photographers Timothy O'Sullivan and William Henry Jackson.

Power house mechanic working on steam pump (1920) by Lewis Hine

Both the Civil War and USGS photographic works point up an important feature of documentary photography: the production of an archive of historical significance, and the distribution to a wide audience through publication. The US Government published Survey photographs in the annual Reports, as well as portfolios designed to encourage continued funding of scientific surveys.

Migrant Mother (1936) by Dorothea Lange, during the Great Depression

The development of new reproduction methods for photography provided impetus for the next era of documentary photography, in the late 1880s and 1890s, and reaching into the early decades of the 20th century. This period decisively shifted documentary from antiquarian and landscape subjects to that of the city and its crises. The refining of photogravure methods, and then the introduction of halftone reproduction around 1890 made low cost mass-reproduction in newspapers, magazines and books possible. The figure most directly associated with the birth of this new form of documentary is the journalist and urban social reformer Jacob Riis. Riis was a New York police-beat reporter who had been converted to urban social reform ideas by his contact with medical and public-health officials, some of whom were amateur photographers. Riis used these acquaintances at first to gather photographs, but eventually took up the camera himself. His books, most notably How the Other Half Lives of 1890 and The Children of the Slums of 1892, used those photographs, but increasingly he also employed visual materials from a wide variety of sources, including police "mug shots" and photojournalistic images.

Riis's documentary photography was passionately devoted to changing the inhumane conditions under which the poor lived in the rapidly expanding urban-industrial centers. His work succeeded in embedding photography in urban reform movements, notably the Social Gospel and Progressive movements. His most famous successor was the photographer Lewis Wickes Hine, whose systematic surveys of conditions of child-labor in particular, made for the National Child Labor Commission and published in sociological journals like The Survey, are generally credited with strongly influencing the development of child-labor laws in New York and the United States more generally.

In 1900, Englishwoman Alice Seeley Harris traveled to the Congo Free State with her husband, John Hobbis Harris (a missionary). There she photographed Belgian atrocities against local people with an early Kodak Brownie camera. The images were widely distributed through magic lantern screenings and were critical in changing public perceptions of slavery and eventually forcing Leopold II of Belgium to cede control of the territory to the Belgian government, creating the Belgian Congo.

In the 1930s, the Great Depression brought a new wave of documentary, both of rural and urban conditions. The Farm Security Administration, a common term for the Historical Division, supervised by Roy Stryker, funded legendary photographic documentarians, including Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, John Vachon, and Marion Post Wolcott among others. This generation of documentary photographers is generally credited for codifying the documentary code of accuracy mixed with impassioned advocacy, with the goal of arousing public commitment to social change.

During the wartime and postwar eras, documentary photography increasingly became subsumed under the rubric of photojournalism. Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank is generally credited with developing a counterstrain of more personal, evocative, and complex documentary, exemplified by his work in the 1950s, published in the United States in his 1959 book, The Americans. In the early 1960s, his influence on photographers like Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander resulted in an important exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), which brought those two photographers together with their colleague Diane Arbus under the title, New Documents. MoMA curator John Szarkowski proposed in that exhibition that a new generation, committed not to social change but to formal and iconographical investigation of the social experience of modernity, had replaced the older forms of social documentary photography.

In the 1970s and 1980s, a spirited attack on traditional documentary was mounted by historians, critics, and photographers. One of the most notable was the photographer-critic Allan Sekula, whose ideas and the accompanying bodies of pictures he produced, influenced a generation of "new new documentary" photographers, whose work was philosophically more rigorous, often more stridently leftist in its politics. Sekula emerged as a champion of these photographers, in critical writing and editorial work. Notable among this generation are the photographers Fred Lonidier, whose 'Health and Safety Game" of 1976 became a model of post-documentary, and Martha Rosler, whose "The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems" of 1974-75 served as a milestone in the critique of classical humanistic documentary as the work of privileged elites imposing their visions and values on the dis-empowered.

Since the late 1990s, an increased interest in documentary photography and its longer term perspective can be observed. Nicholas Nixon extensively documented issues surrounded by American life. South African documentary photographer Pieter Hugo engaged in documenting art traditions with a focus on African communities. Antonin Kratochvil photographed a wide variety of subjects, including Mongolia's street children for the Museum of Natural History. Fazal Sheikh sought to reflect the realities of the most underprivileged peoples of different third world countries.

Documentary photography vs. photojournalism

Documentary photography generally relates to longer term projects with a more complex story line, while photojournalism concerns more breaking news stories. The two approaches often overlap.

Acceptance by the art world

Since the late 1970s, the decline of magazine published photography meant traditional forums for such work were vanishing. Many documentary photographers have now focused on the art world and galleries of a way of presenting their work and making a living. Traditional documentary photography has found a place in dedicated photography galleries alongside other artists working in painting, sculpture and modern media.

Notable documentary photographers

United States

3

Europe

3

Other

3

See also

• Conservation photography
• Street photography

Sources

• "A New History of Photography" Könemann Verlagsgesellschaft/Michel Frizot 1998
• "Down the Line; Light Rail's First Day; Getting off on the right track"; Star Tribune, June 27, 2004.