Introduction
In the broadest sense, all photography not intended purely as a means of artistic expression might be considered ‘documentary’, the photograph a visual document of an event, place, object, or person, providing evidence of a moment in time. Social or other information can be extracted from vast numbers of early photographs: for example, those assembled by Queen Victoria and Tsar Nicholas II to record aspects of their reigns; industrial collections like the Krupp archive; Thomas Annan's Glasgow series; country house photography; many views (especially of towns); early crime scene photographs; the snapshots of amateurs like J.-H. Lartigue and Alice Austen; and so on. Even some photographs conceived by their creators as primarily expressive have been used later as documents: for example, the work of pictorialists such as Alfred Stieglitz (notably The Steerage (1907)); the Photo-Secessionists' realistic images; or the work of Paul Strand and others in straight photography.
Yet the term ‘documentary photography’ has a more specific meaning. The Life Library's Documentary Photography (1972) defined it as ‘a depiction of the real world by a photographer whose intent is to communicate something of importance—to make a comment—that will be understood by the viewer’. The authors proposed three phases of its development over time: conveying visual reality (for example, the work of John Thomson, William Henry Jackson, or Eugène Atget); social reality (Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, and the
Perhaps as a means of differentiating it from photojournalism, to which it is closely related, modern definitions of documentary photography have focused less on its role in recording reality than on its ability to demonstrate the need for change. Thus the Brazilian documentary photographer Sebastião Salgado has described photography, in Witness in our Time (2000), as an activist's expression of ideology, ‘a vector connecting the different realities of people around the world’.
The use of photography to document the need for reform began, modestly, in the mid-19th century. When Henry Mayhew began an investigation into the lives of the English labouring poor, originally published in the Morning Chronicle and subsequently as London Labour and the London Poor (1851), he engaged the daguerreotypist Richard Beard (1801-85) to do a series of ‘character studies’ of the various ‘types’ of the working poor, images which became the basis of the engraved illustrations in the book. Beard, a businessman rather than a photographer, had immediately grasped the potential of Daguerre's invention, and purchased the exclusive right to use the process in England, establishing ‘daguerrean galleries’ in London in 1841. However, the images of London labourers were only a minor part of the work of one of those galleries, and were not widely circulated or seen. And photography played only a minor role in the investigative and reforming process.
By contrast, when a later journalist-reformer, Adolphe Smith, undertook another study of the London poor in the 1870s, he collaborated directly with John Thomson in Street Life in London (1877-8), in which 37 case histories of various occupational ‘types’ were illustrated by Woodburytype reproductions of Thomson's photographs. Compelled by his use of the wet-plate process to pose his subjects rather than capturing them informally, Thomson, who also photographed London high society, has been criticized for sentimentalizing and misrepresenting the nature of their poverty. Nevertheless, Thomson was certainly one of the originators of social documentary photography. (In Russia, his contemporary—and fellow Scotsman—William Carrick was not only photographing social types in the studio, but also capturing Volga boatmen at work and peasants in the fields). Another photographer who recorded lower-class Londoners, Paul Martin, did so in a much more informal and, to our eyes, ‘modern’ way, by using a hand-held camera disguised as a parcel.
Finally, although his entire career as a photographer was as an employee of the US government, Jack Hillers, chief photographer on John Wesley Powell's second survey expedition down the Colorado River in 1871-2, is also regarded as a precursor of social reform documentary photography. Subsequently employed by the US Geological Survey and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Hillers became essentially an ethnographic photographer, winning the trust of the south-western tribes he photographed, and sympathetically recording their daily lives.
The American Progressive Era
American Progressivism (1890-1920) was marked by an optimistic belief that informed citizens could reform social evils through the democratic process. Middle-class reformers mounted multiple crusades: against disease and poverty in inner cities crowded with immigrants, exploitation of women and children in the workforce, official corruption, and alcoholism; and in favour of universal education, proper sanitation, pure food and safe drugs, and women's suffrage. In the hands of the reform pioneers Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, the camera played a major consciousness-raising role in the passage of progressive legislation that altered cities and regulated children's employment, and transformed the understanding of photography's social and educational potential.
Riis, a Danish immigrant, worked as a labourer before becoming a police reporter in 1873 for the New York Tribune. Unlike Spencerian Social Darwinists, he believed that the poor were not inferior beings whose poverty resulted from inborn laziness or ineptitude, but were forced into it by their destructive surroundings. His answer to slums was model housing. He turned to photography because of his passionate commitment to reform, and his conviction that if ‘there was some way of putting before the people’ the terrible conditions he saw in his midnight trips with the sanitary police, people of good will would demand change. He read about German experiments with flash photography and eventually learned to use a dry-plate camera outfit. First in lantern-slide lectures, then in articles for the Evening Sun, and finally in the book How the Other Half Lives (1890), he forced the public to confront every detail of the squalor that his flashlit images exposed in the nocturnal city. Of the book's 43 illustrations, fifteen were half-tone reproductions rather than line drawings based on photographs, and they helped change the patterns of journalism. Riis showed images not only of sweatshops and overcrowded lodging houses, but of the good that education could accomplish. Although later scholars have read a degree of racism into the main text of his books, his photography and captions reveal not only a superb eye for detail and composition, but a sympathetic understanding of the destructiveness of the urban environment.
Hine came to the reform crusade against child labour already trained in photography and sociology. Though he had worked in a factory, his middle-class, educated background was more typical of Progressivism. His photographic career lasted nearly four decades, and moved social documentary photography in significant new directions. He pioneered the approach of making photographs broadly available through posters and publications. (As with Riis, the impact of his efforts was vastly increased by the spread of half-tone reproduction technology.) His earliest reform photographs, of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, were in the tradition of Riis. Although there is no evidence that the two knew each other, both worked for the reform journal Charities and Commons. Using initially a 12.7 × 17.8 cm (5 × 7 in) view camera, Hine during his career witnessed significant technical and artistic changes. He was associated with the Photo League and, although rejected by Roy Stryker at the FSA, worked in the Depression for the Works Progress Administration.
FSA and OWI
Nearly 180, 000 photographs produced 1935-43 under the direction of Roy Stryker, first in the FSA, and later in the Office of War Information (OWI), represent the first major body of photographic images specifically labelled ‘documentary photography’. Many who use the photographs forget that the FSA—originally called the Resettlement Administration (RA)—began not as a photographic project, but as a larger New Deal agency created in 1935 to help solve the economic crisis of the rural poor during the Depression. The RA's first director, Rexford Tugwell, hired Stryker in 1935 to create a ‘Historical Section’ to provide photographs for use as promotional illustrations of the FSA's work. Tugwell resigned when the agency's controversial experimental policies led to Congressional outrage, and its less radical mission, including the Historical Section, was transferred to the Department of Agriculture and renamed in 1937. War, and the shrinking of the FSA budget, led Stryker to move the section again in 1941 to OWI. When internal divisions there over propaganda policy threatened the massive Historical Section photographic files with dispersal, Stryker arranged for their transfer to the Library of Congress, where the images (both negatives and file prints) are now held.
During its lifetime, the Historical Section employed 44 photographers; a majority of photographs in the file are the work of fifteen men and women. The agency's work took place in two locations: at its Washington, DC headquarters, where Stryker directed operations, including a darkroom and the growing file of photographs; and in the field in the (then) 48 states and Puerto Rico. Headquarters supplied photographers with cameras, film, and flashbulbs. Stryker often gave them detailed general instructions (known as ‘shooting scripts’), and sent them out to document the work of FSA local agents and the broader economic realities of farms, ranches, and rural rehabilitation projects. Most sent exposed film back to headquarters to be developed and later provided captions to proofs returned to them in the field. Initially, images of the people and landscapes affected by the intense rural poverty predominated in the file, bringing the human cost of the Depression into sharp focus. After 1937 the photographers included more images of the community life of rural small towns, and a few urban centres. From 1940, as Stryker first subcontracted the section's photographic services to wartime agencies, then worked within OWI, hundreds of images also documented the nation's industrial production and home front activities. As the file at headquarters grew, so too did its use and reputation. FSA images were freely available, and appeared widely in newspapers and magazines, in government pamphlets, in posters promoting agency accomplishments, and even in a giant photographic mural in Grand Central Station in New York.
As a teacher at Columbia University, Stryker had valued photography for its power to persuade and educate. The first photographers he hired, Walker Evans, Carl Mydans, and Ben Shahn, taught him to understand the importance of visual integrity and artistic quality in documentary images. His photographic staff were among the finest of their generation. Dorothea Lange created memorable images of migrant labourers in the American West. Arthur Rothstein, whose first job in 1935 was to set up the Historical Section's darkroom, became one of its most productive photographers. Stryker hired, and his experienced staff helped train, a whole generation of new recruits: John Vachon, Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, Jack Delano, John Collier Jr., Gordon Parks, and Esther Bubley were among those who began distinguished careers under the FSA/OWI.
The influence of the FSA/OWI photographers on modern photography is almost incalculable. Walker Evans's exhibition of his FSA images at MoMA, New York, in 1938 helped define ‘documentary photography’ as an art form. The creation, and preservation in the file, of a series of images forming a coherent narrative served as precedent and inspiration for the development of the photo-essay by Life and Look magazines. FSA/OWI photographers worked with and demonstrated the value of new technologies: several used 35mm ‘miniature’ cameras effectively to capture spontaneous action and intimate portraits, sometimes unbeknown to the subjects. OWI photographers were among the first government photographers to use 35mm colour transparency film on a large scale. The concentration on real people who retained dignity in the face of immense hardship, combined with instinctive recognition of the importance of a distinctively photographic aesthetic, inspired imitators throughout the world. Rediscovered in the 1960s and 1970s, the FSA/OWI photographs were initially criticized as ‘propaganda’ for their alleged distortion and manipulation, but later achieved iconic status as a unique photographic and historical legacy.
The Photo League
Between 1936 and 1951, the Photo League emerged as the leading US organization championing the development of documentary photography. Defending photography both as an expressive medium and an agent for social change, it originated in the earlier Film and Photo League after the film-makers moved out of the group's shared headquarters in New York. A membership organization of amateurs and professionals, the league also functioned as a cooperative, giving independent professionals a base from which to run their businesses. It provided members' darkroom space, mounted photographic exhibitions, offered elementary and advanced classes in photography, and gave photographers an outlet for news and ideas through its newsletter, Photo Notes. The league, through its founders Sol Libsohn and Sid Grossman, was instrumental in preserving the photographic oeuvre of Lewis Hine. Members of the ‘Documentary Production Group’ completed important projects on New York street life in the Lower East Side and Harlem 1936-42. Documentary photography by league members Walter Rosenblum, Paul Strand, and Harold Corsini appeared regularly in Fortune, Look, US Camera, and Good Photography. After the Second World War the league began a fund-raising effort to make its headquarters a ‘Center of American Photography’. However, in December 1947 the FBI and the US Attorney-General blacklisted the league as a communist front organization, basing charges in part on Grossman's 1940 documentation of labour union activities. Though the charges were unsubstantiated, Cold War fears led to a drop in membership, loss of tuition income, and inability to get its exhibitions reviewed in the mainstream press. Unable to pay its rent, the league disbanded in the summer of 1951.
The league's most important contribution to documentary photography was probably its dual roles of teaching new photographers and then providing a centre where those committed to documentary photography could connect with each other, to meet, exchange ideas, and view each other's work. In the late 1930s, when few photographic exhibition galleries existed and museum collecting of photographs was in its infancy, the league held regular exhibitions featuring the work of both established photographers and newcomers. Students in its classes could see the work of Eugene Atget, Lewis Hine, Paul Strand, and Edward Weston. The league was the first to exhibit Weegee's work. At its monthly meetings, speakers included Henri Cartier-Bresson, Strand, Stryker, Margaret Bourke-White, and Berenice Abbott. The photographic historians Beaumont and Nancy Newhall were members, as were Elizabeth McCausland and W. Eugene Smith. In Walter Rosenblum's words, at the league ‘interesting people, deeply involved with photography, were happy to help young photographers understand in greater depth the meaning of photography as a fine art’.
Mass-Observation in Britain
The Mass-Observation (M-O) research organization in Britain was, like the FSA, much larger than the documentary photographic work for which it is also known. It was founded in January 1937 by three young left-wing intellectuals, Charles Madge, Tom Harrison, and the Surrealist photographer and film-maker Humphrey Jennings (1907-50), who had been dismayed, during the crisis of Edward VIII's abdication, by the population's continuing affection for the monarchy. Madge declared that to understand ordinary working-class people, intellectuals needed to study them by ‘mass observation’; and the three determined to create an organization that would change society by using anthropological observation techniques to probe the character of the British, and especially of the northern working class. Active until the early 1950s, M-O undertook an almost quixotic range of projects, resulting in the publication of 25 books between 1937 and 1950. In addition to paid investigators who observed people in public settings (pubs, meetings, leisure and sport activities) thousands of volunteers were recruited to keep diaries and respond to monthly thematic questionnaires. Though central direction lagged during the war years, many of these diarists continued faithfully, creating a rich legacy of wartime observations. Best known, perhaps, was the study of industrial ‘Worktown’ (Bolton, Lancashire) and its inhabitants' annual seaside holiday at Blackpool, an intensive project between 1937 and 1940 that continued sporadically through the war years. The voluminous Mass-Observation Archive was donated to Sussex University in 1970.
Photography was from the beginning an important observation technique for M-O, and the best known of its photographers, Jennings and Humphrey Spender, were strongly influenced by the example of the FSA. Spender took more than 800 candid photographs as part of the ‘Worktown’ study, using a hidden 35mm camera in the belief that ‘truth would be revealed only when people were not aware of being photographed’. Jennings, too, photographed the grimy environment of Bolton before abandoning M-O to concentrate on documentary film-making. Later, photography continued to be an important part of Mass-Observation work; in the village of Luccombe in Somerset, for example, John Hinde used colour photography as part of a 1944 M-O study coordinated with the Ministry of Information to export the image of an idealized English rural community.
French humanist documentary
French ‘humanism’ lies at the heart of 20th-century photojournalism. It was a dominant form of documentary and editorial photography from the late 1920s until the 1970s, though its impact is still felt in the 21st century. It influenced the style and content of all the great illustrated magazines of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, in Europe and America. Many of the leading names of 20th-century photography were associated at various points in the life of the movement (although that is perhaps a tendentious term for such a loose grouping of like-minded individuals): Kertész and Brassaï, Marcel Bovis (1904-97), Boubat, Pierre Boucher (b. 1908), Robert Capa, Jean-Philippe Charbonnier (b. 1921), Dieuzaide, Doisneau, François Kollar (1904-79), Janine Niépce (b. c.1920), Riboud, Ronis, Roger Schall (1904-95), Seymour, Sabine Weiss (b. 1924), and many others (including younger photographers like Martine Franck). The leading photo agencies Rapho and Magnum were formed to distribute the work of such photographers, and played a key role in the development of humanism as a global photographic paradigm. Steichen's Family of Man exhibition (1955) used many images drawn from the corpus, or heavily influenced by it.
Its subject matter was concisely defined by perhaps its best-known exponent, Henri Cartier-Bresson, when he told a journalist in 1951 that the most important subject for him and his colleagues was ‘mankind; man and his life, so brief, so frail, so threatened’. In this sense, humanism has an ethically combative edge, aiming to celebrate and defend a humanity everywhere challenged by totalitarian power—particularly in the period 1936-68, with the Second World War and the subsequent period of reconstruction of special importance. A French magazine article of 1955 refers to a type of photography that takes as its subject ‘the human being and the mark that he leaves on nature and on things’.
French humanism is deeply rooted in social themes, particularly those which came to prominence in 1939-45, and the occupation and liberation of France. After 1944, humanist photography helped to reconstruct what it was to be French. In this, the role of the photographer providing illustrative images to the press may not seem of critical importance, but it played a part in the evolution of new representations of Frenchness which can be seen as having a primarily solidaristic role. They cluster around certain themes, the majority of which contain a central core of social and cultural referents having to do with community and solidarity, and with the sense of happiness or contentment which derives from human association.
Visually, French humanism was greatly influenced by the poetic realism of Hungarian photographers like Kertész, who worked in Paris between 1925 and 1934, and Brassaï, whose Paris de nuit (1934) was almost a textbook for the movement. The work of émigré photographers trained in German photojournalism of the 1920s, such as Germaine Krull, and the impact of the modernism of Rodchenko and Moholy-Nagy also played a part in inspiring a nouvelle vision in which the small hand-held camera—the new Leica and Rolleiflex in particular—freed the photographer from reliance on the studio. The street and the lives of ordinary people became the working place and the subject matter of preference, for pictures made by freelance photographers who sold their work to the illustrated press— Vu, Match, Regards, and others pre-1940, Point de Vue, Paris Match, and Réalités after the war. But perhaps more significant than the visual style of the work was the general support felt by this generation of photographers (most born between c. 1905 and the early 1920s) for the political values of the Popular Front of the mid-1930s. Some belonged to the Communist Party or its cultural front organizations; all believed in the need to transform France to make it both more egalitarian and better able to withstand the menace of fascism.
After the miseries of defeat and occupation, the period of Fourth Republic reconstruction to 1958 witnessed the heyday of French humanist photography, revealing both its moral purpose and its distinctive subject matter. It is inclusive and universalistic, stressing equality and the primacy of the fundamental institutions of liberal society, and in particular their solidaristic connotations. Surrealism's fascination with the unconscious aspects of everyday existence is a clear influence on French humanism—but not its raison d'être. It celebrates the ordinary, the everyday, the unremarked. It has a dozen or so recurrent themes, including the street, childhood, love, the family, the home, work, popular celebrations, and cultural personalities. While stressing the importance of simple, unretouched, realist representations, it also places particular value on their ‘poetic’ construction, a ‘poetic realism’ made for the printed page rather than the gallery wall. Indeed, one of the best-selling illustrated books of the post-war era, Paris des rêves (1950), combined humanist photographs by ‘Izis’ with handwritten poetry by leading French writers, from André Breton to Louise de Vilmorin. Key books such as Robert Doisneau's Banlieue de Paris (1949), Cartier-Bresson's Images à la sauvette (The Decisive Moment, 1952), Ronis's Belleville-Ménilmontant (1954), showed this work to its best advantage, but also demonstrate how the photographers were linked to central cultural figures of the day: painters such as Matisse, Picasso, or Bracque, and writers like Blaise Cendrars and Pierre Mac Orlan.
Although the movement gradually lost steam from 1968, many of the photographers continued working, some into their nineties. Their work remains popular, and though sometimes mistakenly criticized as sentimental or nostalgic, it remains of great historical importance, picturing a world where values such as the primacy of human feelings and the sense of community still commanded widespread support.
Since the 1950s
Beginning in the 1950s, but increasingly after 1970, documentary photography became many things to many audiences. Charlotte Cotton, curator of the exhibition Stepping in and Stepping out: Contemporary Documentary Photography at London's Victoria & Albert Museum (2002), pointed to the ‘range of emotional forces—political, humanist and aesthetic—which drive [contemporary] documentary photography’. An even larger London show the following year, Tate Modern's Cruel and Tender, illustrated both its contemporary and historical diversity. Simply counting relatively conventional social documentary work in Europe and the USA since the 1970s yields a huge range of subjects, from teenage sex and drug abuse (Larry Clark), old age (Martine Franck), and domestic violence (Donna Ferrato) to post-industrial desolation (Chris Killip, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen), female sex-workers (Susan Meiselas), the British seaside (Martin Parr, Tony Ray-Jones), and the French fishing industry (Jean Gaumy (b. 1948)).
The tradition of reporting unsettling social realities founded by Riis and Hine, and continued by the FSA/OWI, was already central to the growing (and to some commentators separate) field of photojournalism. In Europe, the Magnum agency became a major international distributor of documentary photography of political events. Outside Europe and North America, independent documentary photographers like Sebastião Salgado continued to use their cameras to protest against inhumane conditions. Documentary practice is now worldwide, its images disseminated through disparate outlets and media: galleries, books, magazines, newspapers and the Internet. Like Paul Strand before 1939, many documentary photographers since 1945, such as René Burri and Larry Clark, have also made films.
Although the earliest social documentary reform photographers had explicitly rejected the designation of their work as ‘art’, much late 20th-century documentary photography attracted this label. Building on the ‘straight’ approach of the Photo League, but in some cases moving towards the exploration of personal rather than societal problems and shortcomings, psychological rather than social reality, the makers of this kind of work captured the alienation and isolation of modern life, often more as distanced observers than as passionate advocates. Beginning with Robert Frank's The Americans (1958), carried further by the gritty realism of Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and Mary Ellen Mark, or the detachment of Diane Arbus, this strand of documentary practice offered ironic commentaries on American complacency.
Though it also appeared in magazines, such work was more likely to be viewed in photographic galleries and book-length monographs than in photo-essays. This important shift was illustrated by W. Eugene Smith, whose pictures appeared periodically in Life until the 1960s, but who published his outsize essay on Pittsburgh in Photography Annual (1959), and the final version of Minamata as a book (1975). The change was driven partly by the decline or disappearance of the great illustrated magazines, but partly also (and encouraged by the rise of an art photography market from the 1960s) by the perception of the photographer-as-artist. Organizations like the Guggenheim and Hasselblad foundations often supplied sponsorship. The appearance of new exhibition venues in cities like San Francisco, New York, London, and Paris, and the creation of dedicated publishing houses such as Ralph Gibson's Lustrum Press, Aperture, and Picture Project provided important outlets.
At the same time as documentary photography turned inward, and some of its practitioners defined themselves, or were defined, primarily as artists, there was a democratization of documentary photography, an adaptation of its potential to the documenting of local communities, ‘empowered’ through being given a means to create and capture their identity through their own or a professional's photographs. Modelled on the FSA/OWI concept of a ‘file’ of photographs that document the reality of a specific time and place, but relying on local funding, this kind of documentary photography often has a celebratory character rather than one of irony or critical outrage. Enterprises such as the California Council for the Humanities Documentary Project, or the ‘Milleni-Brum’ project of the Birmingham Central Library, England, to document under-represented ethnic groups, re-emphasize its earliest meaning of simply making a record. In the USA on a national scale, the FSA model survived in the 1970s Project DOCUMERICA funded by the Environmental Protection Agency to document the condition of the environment.The later decades of the 20th century saw the appearance of numerous show-filling and/or book-length documentary projects, though mainly in North America, western Europe and Japan. Notable figures elsewhere included David Goldblatt in South Africa, Boris Mikhailov in the Ukraine, and, above all, Sebastião Salgado in Brazil and internationally.
— Constance B. Schulz
Bibliography
- Light, K., Witness in our Time: Working Lives of Documentary Photographers (2000)
