DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY

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DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY
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Although the term documentary wasnt coined
until 1926 by British filmmaker John Grierson,
photographers such as Eugene Atget had been using
the camera since the turn of the century to
create comprehensive documentation of subjects as
large as the city of Paris.
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Grierson believed that documentaries should do
more than simply record reality they should
educate and persuade. Edward Curtiss twenty-five
year documentation of Native American culture
would fit this description, though Curtis has
been widely criticized for romanticizing his
subjects.
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JACOB RIIS HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES
Riis was a police reporter turned social
reformer. During the late 1800s he used the
camera to fight for the elimination of slum
conditions on New Yorks lower East Side. His
straight, non-artistic style fit the early
notion that documentary should avoid artiness, as
social facts were considered to be dramatic
enough in themselves.
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Riis thought of himself as a social reformer his
photographs (and the accompanying writings) were
intended to suggest ways to deal with operative
social forces. They can thus be considered, in a
sense, propaganda.
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LEWIS HINE CHILDREN AT WORK
Hine was among the first to realize that the
camera could speak to the emotions a self-taught
photographer, himself a former factory worker and
teacher, Hine devoted his life to documenting the
social conditions of his time, from the
immigrants at Ellis Island to working class
people. His child labor images pricked the
nations conscience, leading to legislation.
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Hines efforts exemplified another important
aspect of documentary the importance of context,
and how, when and where the images are shown.
Hine put together narratives through the use of
exhibitions and publications that combined with
words to present his case against child labor.
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For Hine, the art of photography lay in its
ability to interpret the everyday world, that of
work, of poverty, of factory, of street,
household. He did not mean beauty or personal
expression. He meant how people live. A straight
photographer, anticipating the direction of
Strand and Stieglitz after the demise of
soft-focus romanticism, for Hine to be straight
meant more than the purity of photographic means
it meant also a responsibility to the truth of
his vision. Alan Trachtenberg Lewis Hine The
World of His Art
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FARM SECURITY ADMINISTRATION
Roy Stryker, who assembled the now legendary FSA
crew during the Great Depression, agreed with
documentary purists that the only acceptable
priority was social change his distrust of art
with regard to documentary pictures put him at
odds with some of his photographers, particularly
Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. Stryker wanted
the work done for political, not aesthetic
purposes.

By Dorothea Lange
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For Lange, a compelling photograph presented an
engaging human drama that addressed questions
larger than the immediate subject. Her subjects
gained importance from external value systems
she was a social-documentary photographer
involved in the social and political events of
her time. We were after the truth, she wrote,
not just making effective pictures.
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The consummate need of the thirties imagination,
observed William Stott in his book Documentary
Expression in Thirties America was to get the
texture of reality, of America, to feel it and
to make it felt.
Today, Langes pictures are figures of history
whose hardship the present viewer is incapable of
easing-- symbols of timeless sorrow.
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WALKER EVANS
The photographs of Walker Evans are remarkable
for their overriding demonstration of order his
consistently frontal approach anchors his
subjects within the photographs. This is in
contrast to other documentarians who depended
more on heightened perspective or overtly
dramatic detail.
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Evans, critics have written, remained relatively
undisturbed by social causes-- his personal
vision happened to coincide and sympathize with
general trends, his basic directness and
bleakness echoing perfectly the mood of the times.
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Evans sought what he termed the vernacular in
American culture, photographing the possessions
and symbols he felt leant dignity and meaning to
the lives of his subjects. By focusing on their
strengths and not their frailties, he sought to
reveal the order and the beauty he believed lay
beneath the surface of their poverty. James
Curtis Minds Eye, Minds Truth
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LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN
First published in 1941, Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men documented the lives of three poor
sharecropper families in the deep south, and
featured the words of James Agee and the
photographs of Walker Evans. Passionately
anti-establishment and deeply personal, Agee
brought issues of class-consciousness and
voyeurism into the fore, questioning journalisms
ability to honestly represent the plight of the
underclass. His rantings were counterbalanced by
Evanss measured, contemplative
documentary-style images, presented without
captions in the front of the book.
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Evans did not share the motive of social protest
with Lange and others. I didnt like the label,
said Evans, that I unconsciously earned of being
a social protest artist. I never took it upon
myself to change the world.
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ROMAN VISHNIACS VANISHED WORLD
Vishniac documented the persecution of Jews in
Poland, Germany, Russia and Chezkoslovakia. Why
did I do it? A hidden camera to record the way of
life of a people who had no desire to be captured
on film. Was it insane to cross into an out of
countries where my life was in danger every day?
It had to be done. I felt that the world was
about to be cast into the mad shadow of Nazism
and that the outcome would be the annihilation of
a people who had no spokesman to record their
plight.
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During my journeys, I took over 16,000
photographs. All but 2,000 were confiscated and
presumably destroyed . . .
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ROBERT FRANKS THE AMERICANS
Swiss-born Robert Frank was at the forefront of
the street photography genre. His 1957 book The
Americans was initially despised by most
critics. The grainy, unconventionally composed
images showed the darker side of post-war
America, focusing on iconography and isolation.
Frank used photography to express personal
narratives, social as well as political. It was
the inevitable anti-journalism.
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Franks The Americans exemplifies Robert Coles
statement that to some extent we see the world
we are looking for. We select for ourselves
visually what our minds and hearts crave to
notice.
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Coles continues Frank . . . brought with him
his own particular sensibility, and soon enough
offered us in The Americans an aspect of
ourselves. He did not show us all there is to
see, obviously, but a selected number of images
meant to convey one more lyrical observers
examination of this wonderfully sprawling and
changing subcontinent, its people so diverse, its
social and cultural history so dramatic and
textured . . .
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BRUCE DAVIDSONS EAST 100th St.
In 1968, Bruce Davidson took his large-format
8x10 camera uptown to East 100th Street in East
Harlem and set about recording the lives and the
people of this poverty stricken block. Davidson
had spent much of the 1960s documenting the civil
rights movement and people on the fringes, but in
many ways East 100th Street was forever to define
him as a photographer.
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By working with a large format camera, Davidson
was saying to everyone that he was not interested
in taking street photographs fleeting images
where the subjects might not even really know you
are there. Instead an 8x10 camera requires a
tripod and considerable effort and time just to
focus the camera and take light measurements, as
well as considerable effort and conspicuousness
to just lug around. The result is rather formal
pictures made with the subjects true consent.
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. . . the age of Photography corresponds
precisely to the explosion of the private into
the public, or rather into the creation of a new
social value, which is the publicity of the
private the private is consumed as such,
publicly . . . Roland Barthes, Camera
Lucida
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By bringing images of daily life and ordinary
people into public view, photography remakes
vision and in so doing produces (or reproduces)
new forms of (class) consciousness. Paula
Rabinowitz
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When does enough turn out to be enough-- when do
we leave reasonably satisfied, and if so, with
what messages given to the people with whom we
have worked? What is our responsibility to such
people . . . When does honorable inquiry turn
into an exercise in manipulative self-interest,
even exploitation?Robert Coles, Doing
Documentary Work
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MILTON ROGOVINS THE FORGOTTEN ONES
Rogovin took up photography in 1957 after being
blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities
Committee, which destroyed his optometry
practice. He turned his lens upon the Lower West
Side of his hometown, Buffalo. First regarded
with suspicion by would-be subjects, he gradually
won their trust, and was able to devote his life
making honest and sympathetic portraits of the
working class poor.
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Rogovins work included a series of portraits of
people at both work and home.
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Rogovin would return two and three times over a
span of several decades to re-photograph
families, a practice he continued until he was
into his 90s.
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SEBASTIAO SALGADOS WORKERS The Brazilian-born
Salgados work closely resemble classic
photojournalism is style and subject matter the
length and breadth of his photograph
investigations go far beyond periodical work. He
left a career as an economist because he felt
that photographs could better express his
concerns than his written reports.
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I have never put myself in a situation where I
have a moral question about whether or not to
photograph, such as Do I have a right to
photograph when the death is there in front of
me, the suffering is there in front of me? I
never ask these questions, because I asked myself
the more important questions before I arrived
there. Do we have the right to the division of
resources that we have in the world? Do I have
the right to eat when others dont eat? Salgado
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I believe that there is no person in the world
that must be protected from pictures. Everything
that happens in the world must be shown and
people around the world must have an idea of
whats happening to the other people around the
world.
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The most interesting function of this kind of
photography is exactly this to show and to
provoke debate and to see how we can go ahead
with our lives. The photographer must participate
in this debate.
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I dont believe you do this because you are
good, or because you are bad, or because you have
a mission. You do it because its your way of
life.