ENCYCLOPEDIA

Documentary Photography

Photography’s propensity for documentation had been recognised since – or even before – its inception, and although documentary photography as a genre originated at the end of the nineteenth century, the term was not widely applied until the 1930s, when it came to dominate the photographic scene.
Developed mainly in the United States in the second half of the decade, the style was influenced by the emergence of documentary cinema and several government-sponsored projects, most notably the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which created a style that was then widely imitated.
As most of these projects had a social focus, this contributed to the misconception that documentary photography necessarily had a social aspect as a fundamental precept.

Most of the literature on the subject also deals with work from this period, introducing a variety of classifications in an attempt to conceptualise the genre based on the specifics of this historical moment.
Nevertheless, documentary photography has evolved throughout the twentieth century, as has its definition, which today has a broader meaning and orientation than simply recording life with the aim of objectivity, in order to educate others or elucidate a truth.
Although it was perceived early on as a tool for explaining different cultures, until the end of the 19th century photography was most often used simply to respond to an interest in the picturesque.
These images were common idealisations, composed in tableaux-like scenes with backdrops, often presented on a cartes-de-visite form – a sort of precursor to the postcard. Depicting workers, street people and views of distant foreign lands, they mostly served as souvenirs. Some long-term projects were initiated, and while they cannot be called documentary, they can be seen as establishing the principles of their traditional approach. These include David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson’s 1845 images of fishermen in Newhaven, Scotland; Henry Mayhew and Richard Beard’s ‘London Labour and London Poor’ (1851-1864); Mathew Brady’s photographs of the American Civil War (1861-1865); Timothy O’Sullivan and William Henry Jackson’s geographical and geological surveys of the American West in the 1870s; and John Thompson’s ‘Illustration of China and its People’ from the same decade.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, photographers were increasingly concerned with capturing disappearing customs and drawing a parallel between the past and the present, as exemplified by the many projects carried out in the United States that focused on Native Americans. Edward Curtis’s project, which began in 1900, consumed 30 years of his life with trips to Indian settlements throughout the United States. However, his work is controversial in terms of documentation, both because he romanticized the Indians as the ‘other’ and because he staged his photographs to capture aspects, such as costumes or ceremonies, of these communities that were long gone by the time he photographed them.
In 1889, the British Journal of Photography declared that a comprehensive photographic archive of the world should be created for its valuable future as a document. Historically seen as evidence and a means of investigation, photography merged with a growing social reform movement in the late 1800s to become an essential element of these campaigns, often played out in the rapidly growing arena of the illustrated press. Its development as a tool for social reform, however, was directly linked to its technical evolution. As drawings and wood engravings were not sufficiently realistic, the urgency for further and cheaper advances in photographic reproduction led to the invention of halftone printing in the 1880s. The invention of the hand-held camera and its increasing availability in 1870-1880 made it possible to take snapshots; from then on, photography gradually integrated with the printed media.
Danish immigrant Jacob Riis was one of the first people in the United States to use photography for social good. Disturbed by the living of immigrants in New York in the 1879s, Riis, a police reporter, wrote long and detailed articles. Accused of exaggeration, he began to use photography to prove his claims and to influence public opinion. But to reproduce these photographs, photogravures had to be made, and the ‘documents’, which still looked like drawings, were received with the same scepticism. It was not until Riis used his photographs in slide lectures and in his publication ‘How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York” (1890) – in which 17 of the images were halftones – that he convinced Americans to take action. Although Riis was a photojournalist, his work can be described as social documentary, as he developed a straightforward and methodical record of a subject with humanitarian concerns.
Lewis Hine, best known for his photographs of immigrants in the early twentieth century, especially children and teenagers doing backbreaking work, began his involvement with photography while teaching science in a New York school.
It soon became clear to Hine that photography could be a powerful tool to combat prejudice against immigrants. In 1904, he began his first documentation of immigrants at the Ellis Islands. Three years later, and for the next decade, he focused on child labour; his famous images of children, often dirty and with forlorn expressions, standing close to machinery, created a sense of scale that made them seem very young indeed. Hine called his images ‘photo interpretations’, referring to his creative choices and the dual aim of informing and moving the viewer. Published as ‘human documents’ and widely distributed in pamphlets, magazines and books, and shown in slide projections and exhibitions, Hine’s photographs were indeed instrumental in the introduction of federal legislation regulating child labour. Together, Riis and Hine are considered the pioneers of social documentary photography.
From the end of the 19th century until the early years of the 1920s, the photographic scene was dominated by Pictorialism, a movement that produced highly manipulated images intended as fine art. Some photographers, largely overlooked at the time but who took exception to this style, went on to become emblematic documentarians. After brilliantly documenting his native Hungary during the First World War, André Kertész moved to Paris in 1925, where he joined the artistic community and began a career as a photojournalist. In 1936 he moved to New York, where he worked as a commercial photographer for the next 25 years. Kertész is best known today as a street photographer, as he never stopped documenting the ordinary in street life in his spare time, and it is for this work that he is one of the most admired photographers of the twentieth century. Eugène Atget’s life is little known, but his work is legendary. His photographs of the streets, shop windows and historic buildings of Paris were initially sold as ‘documents pour artistes’ (documents for artists) to painters who used them as guidelines for their work. Discovered by the Surrealists – who saw his images as fragments of reality, free of cultural intentions and thus open to subjective interpretation – Atget saw some of his images published in the magazine La Révolution Surrealiste in 1926.
When he died, a year later, the American photographer Berenice Abbott bought his entire oeuvre and introduced and promoted it in the United States in the in the 1930s. In 1968, it was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, and in the 1980s Atget was finally established as a leading master of photography.
The German August Sander, a commercial studio photographer, had already begun his ambitious project “People of the 20th Century” in the early 1920s. This self-imposed project consisted of documenting people of all classes and occupations, and included some of his early commissioned portraits from the 1910s, when he first developed the idea. However, recognition of his achievement came much later with the publication of his book ‘Antlitz der Zeit’ in 1929. A selection of 60 portraits, it inspired enthusiastic critics who placed him at the forefront of documentary photography. The influential philosopher Walter Benjamin, for example, appreciated Sander’s photographs and wrote about them in his “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie” (1931), a milestone in photographic theory.
In the 1920s, as the dominance of Pictorialism began to wane, photographic practice in general moved closer to the idea of the document, rejecting manipulation, soft-focus or retouching and seeking to explore the purity of the medium. As Modernism spread around the world, a straightforward approach to photography became the rule, but not without generating contradictory interpretations.
Influenced by the Russian Constructivists, the Hungarian-born László Moholy-Nagy, then teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany, in the late 1920s, in his book “Von Material zu Architecktur” (1929, translated as “The New Vision” in 1932), theorised the expansion and liberation of human perception through pure photography. The recommended wide angles, innovative perspectives and innovative use of materials, however, did not inspire a documentary approach, but rather an experimental one. The New Objectivity of the German avant-garde, exemplified by Albert Renger-Patzch, and the American Straight Photography of Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and Edward Weston, among others, sought to rediscover simplicity and rigour as a descriptive tendency. Already known for his book “Die Welt ist Schon” (1928) – extremely sharp close-ups of natural and man-made objects of beauty – Renger-Patzch received recognition for his seemingly impersonal description of the world and became the new model for serious photographers.
At the same time, some American straight photography was shown at the landmark Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart in 1929, allowing German critics to project the quest for objectivity onto this work as well. In fact, the ideals of directness and simplicity had already been pointed out as an American problem in European magazines several years earlier; many American photographers had turned away from artifice and created simpler forms of expression based on sharpness and elegant geometry, as evidenced by the publication of Paul Strand’s photographs in Stieglitz’s influential Camera Work magazine as early as 1916. This journal, which had been a proponent of Pictorialism for many years and had indeed helped to spread the style worldwide, now helped to spread the idea that ‘straight photography’ was the new, modern mode.
Although none of the achievements of the practitioners of this new style were considered documentary at the time, many were later, such as Weston’s Mexican folk art images, and their significance as a significant step in the direction of documentary photography remains. The discovery and wider circulation of Atget’s work in the second half of the 1920s, and later that of Sander, also helped to challenge existing photographic ideology.
Another crucial factor in the establishment and growth of the documentary form was the introduction of documentary film “Nanook of the North” (1922), a diary of the life of Canadian Eskimos by the American filmmaker Robert Flaherty, was a great success and motivated the major studios to produce films of this kind. The Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, creator of “Man with a Movie Camera” (1929), declared that he was the ‘’film-eye’’, meaning that his films showed what and how the eyes see, i.e. life as it is.
The term ‘documentary’ as a definition of a genre appeared in 1926 in a review of Flaherty’s Moana (1926) by the British theorist and filmmaker John Grierson. A similar use of the term in photography was first applied in France and Germany in 1928, as the French historian Olivier Lugon confirms in his meticulous book Le Style Documentaire: “D’August Sander à Walker Evans – 1920 -1945” (2001), and around 1930 in the United States.
Indeed, the ‘documentary’ became a trend in this period in fields as diverse as the social sciences, literature and art, as one legitimated the other. Gisèle Freund, in her classic book “Photographie et Societé” (1974), claims that although the official recognition and public announcement of photography took place in January 1839, this was thirteen years after Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s development of a primitive photographic process. She argues that it was only then that photography encountered a ”social element” that had previously been absent, which made its successful reception possible; in other words, it was only when society was ready to accept it that photography was ”invented”. It can be argued that the 1930s was the equivalent moment for documentary photography, meeting its social element in the form of the economic disaster of 1929, known as the Great Depression.
As part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the Resettlement Administration (RA), later named Farm Security Administration (FSA), was established in 1935. Its Historical Unit, a small group of photographers, aimed to provide visual documentation to justify the government’s relief and make-work programmes and to help urban audiences understand the poverty and hardship of the rural population. Roy Stryker, a former economics teacher with little experience of photography, was appointed director of the project.
Although Stryker wrote ‘scripts’ which dictated what he expected the assignments to achieve, the FSA photographers, including Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee and Arthur Rothstein, were given a great deal of freedom in the way they photographed. Evans and Lange, who historian John Szarkowski credits with much of the FSA’s success, used the agency’s structure to develop their own projects and documentary ideals. Lange’s work was clearly humanitarian, centred on the presence and emotional expression of people, which she believed could be socially and politically useful.
Evans, on the other hand, used a highly impersonal style to document ordinary things, and when he photographed people, they were presented as anonymous and interchangeable.
Walker Evans’s style came to dominate the idea of what documentary photography should be, as ‘purist’ ideas began to dominate photographic circles, extending the prohibitions on manipulating the photographic image to the act of taking the photographic image. After a brief stay in Europe, Evans returned to New York in 1929 ready to embrace the experimental precepts of the New Vision, but soon, influenced by Atget’s work, he returned to a simpler aesthetic. He concentrated on vernacular architecture, first independently and then by commission, the results of which were his first solo photographic exhibition at MoMA in 1933, and a selection of which was included in his American Photographs book and exhibition, also at MoMA, in 1938. Commissioned by the FSA in 1935, Evans pursued his idea of documenting American society through the everyday environment, such as shop windows, advertising signs and vernacular architecture, which gave evidence of human interaction but did not show it.
Evans’s work, along with Sander’s, thus constitutes a distinct style within documentary photography, presenting images as ‘types’ that are meant to evoke larger thoughts, rather than inviting the viewer to concentrate on particulars and develop empathy for the individual or circumstance depicted. Evans himself considered the term ‘documentary’ to be misleading and suggested in the 1970s that the correct term should be ‘documentary style’. By presenting an aesthetic that has often been identified as ‘anti-aesthetic’, these bodies of work established their own theoretical concepts. By embodying the ideals of neutrality and the formal qualities of ”straight photography”, such as frontality, emphasis on sharpness and brightness, presentation of static elements and balanced compositions with each detail of equal importance, the ability of the image to stand on its own without captions or explanations, and the presentation of images in series, Evans and Sander created a documentary approach that perhaps mimicked actual photographic documents too closely.
They have been accused, for example, of producing works of no more quality than passport photographs. John Grierson clarified, albeit in relation to film, that ‘‘documentary was from the beginning…an ‘anti-aesthetic’ movement…what confuses the history is that we had always the good sense to use the aesthetes. … We mastered the techniques necessary for our unaesthetic purposes.’’
As John Szarkowski, whose vision of what photography should be powerfully shaped the post-war aesthetic, wrote: ”Pictures that would look ingenuous and guileless, that would seem not only honest but artless…[were] of course an aesthetic choice and an artistic strategy.” While the photo-document has a strictly informational value that has long been used to deny that such photographs could be art, often by the photographers themselves, the documentary style embodies the idea that documentary photography has multiple uses and interpretations. Atget’s work is a common example of this attitude, although it is almost certain that he was unaware of its potential as an artistic expression, and that he took his Parisian images because he felt they would not be available to him in person as the years passed and progress inevitably changed the face of the city he loved so much.
However, the notions of what constitutes a ‘documentary style’ or aesthetic in the realm of fine art photography are not necessarily what documentary photography means to the wider public, nor were the intricacies of the debate of particular interest as photographs continued to be consumed exponentially by society. By the middle of the century, it was generally accepted that all photographs told the ‘truth’ and that some photographs told stories, and that the stories as presented in photographs were in fact accurate and fair, a creed developed by the social documentarians at the beginning of the century. After Lange and Evans left the FSA in 1940 and 1937 respectively, they continued to document their own projects. While Lange worked on the unjust internment of Japanese Americans in camps after Pearl Harbor, Evans began a project with the writer James Agee that resulted in the infamous book “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” (1941). The project, a study of Alabama sharecroppers, became a foundational text of the civil rights movement later in the century. Despite its propagandistic intentions, the FSA project produced the most comprehensive documentation of America to date, helping to establish documentary photography as a genre and inspiring countless other projects.
While documentary photography initially focused on images of rural life, the urban scene was simultaneously documented by Berenice Abbott and the photographers of New York’s Photo League. Abbott, who had a commercial studio in Paris, returned to New York in 1927 and, like Evans, initially photographed under the influence of the New Vision. She later adopted Atget’s approach, attempting to do in New York what Atget had done in Paris. The result, “Changing New York, 1935-1939”, was developed under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration’s Art Project.
The Film and Photo League was founded in 1930 and reorganised as the Photo League in 1936. A group of politically committed photographers who idealised Lewis Hine came together to support workers’ rights – an extension of the German workers’ photography movement – by documenting the lives and everyday struggles of ordinary people. Its board of directors included such luminaries as Berenice Abbott, Paul Strand, W. Eugene Smith and Nancy and Beaumont Newhall.
One of its most extensive projects was ‘The Harlem Document’, photographed between 1932 and 1940 by various members of the Photo League under the direction of Aaron Siskind, which captured life in this changing African-American neighbourhood. In the 1940s, when there was a general tendency towards a more personal approach, the subjects considered acceptable to the aims of The Photo League broadened to include subjects with greater aesthetic appeal, attracting photographers known for their advanced fine art aesthetic such as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. In 1947, the Photo League was harassed as a subversive communist organisation and disbanded in 1951.
In Germany, as the political situation in the Weimar Republic became more complex, the admiration for American straight photography turned a figure like Renger-Patzch into someone who had sold out and adopted a foreign trend. Conservatives, who idealised the representation of an authentic German ‘soul’, criticised the New Objectivity movement for being modernist and internationalist. Leftists denounced the same movement as superficial and reflecting bourgeois triviality, and called for more socially relevant photographic work. At the end of the 1920s, Renger-Patzch turned to documenting open views of industrial landscapes. This more systematic approach, which demonstrated a greater distance from the subject with the idea of being more ‘objective’, struck a responsive chord. A peculiarly German style of documentary photography emerged. Sander appeared as its epithet in early 1930. Atget’s work was cited as a model, as it had been in America.
The rise of the Nazis in 1933 stifled free debate and artistic expression with its pernicious ideology and its adaptation of an exaggerated documentary style as propaganda (Socialist Realism). However, the development of the documentary genre was not completely halted. Roman Vishniac, exiled in Berlin from the Soviet Union, documented the Jewish ghettos in Poland. Sander, who saw his book “Antlitz der Zeit” withdrawn from the market and his plates destroyed, continued to document landscapes.
In the 1920s and 1930s, leftist European and Russian photographers, concerned with the economic and political scenes of their countries and inspired by the “documentary truth” or agitprop of Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky’s photomontages, turned to urban documentation. In an attempt to make the working classes aware of their deprived conditions and political power, they formed the workers’ photography movement, which operated in a variety of styles in countries such as the Netherlands, Belgium and England. This movement was particularly successful in England and is known as the Mass Observation Project (MO), which aimed to produce anthropological documentaries. In the 1930s, the British photographer Bill Brandt, who was not part of the MO movement and was involved in Surrealism, effectively documented the class divisions and the lives of the miners.
At the same time, the Mexican capital was an international centre for artistic and intellectual exchange, profiting from the political turmoil in Europe by welcoming its artists, writers and intellectuals.
Encouraged by government support and the presence of Edward Weston, Paul Strand and Tina Modotti, a number of photographers embarked on a series of modernist documentary projects. Mexico’s most famous photographer, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, had experimented with abstraction at the beginning of his career in the 1920s. In the 1930s he created modernist images, documenting Mexican life, religious culture and landscapes. Bravo’s photographic journey was copied by others around the world. In the words of Olivier Lugon, “the growing dominance of the genre was an institutionalised form of political and social reaction”.
In the 1930s and 1940s, definitions of the documentary approach were malleable and varied according to the personal or cultural trends and interests of the moment, and were sometimes even contradictory. Documentary photography was thought to be impartial and simply instructive, yet able to persuade and move the viewer. After a move towards a cooler, less authoritative approach, it was to become more emotional and personal, preferably compassionate and humanistic; when capturing social conditions, it was to focus first on their hardships and later on their positive aspects; it was also to move from presentation without supporting text to an almost obligatory pairing of image and text, as documentary photography began to merge with the notion of the photo essay, approaching photojournalism and gradually losing its dominance. The increasing demand for photojournalistic projects, fuelled by the rise of magazines such as Life, and the decline in government funding and commissioning of documentary projects in the 1940s forced many documentary photographers to turn to news photography. Documentary photography declined in production and importance throughout the 1940s and 1950s.
There is still a common misunderstanding about the difference between documentary photography and photojournalism. Both produce documents in the historical sense, based on existing (‘real’) circumstances and issues. However, photojournalism is fundamentally factual and has a presumed testimonial status as a matter of its own ethics, while the documentary image can also be allegorical and not limited to an informative function. As the name suggests, photojournalistic images are made to fulfil the visual needs of the news and are severely constrained by time and space. Photojournalists tend to work to tight deadlines, with little opportunity to get to know, let alone understand, their subject matter, and as the flow of information has radically increased with the advent of the Internet, these deadlines are virtually instantaneous, with photojournalists downloading images almost literally as they are taken. Even when commissioned, photojournalists typically spend a great deal of time methodically researching, observing and photographing their chosen subject in order to achieve an in-depth portrayal.
As FSA chief Roy Stryker said, ‘The job is to know enough about the subject to find its meaning in itself and in relation to its environment, its time and its function’.
Another difference is that photojournalism always relies on words, often presenting only one image that is subjectively judged to best summarise the story. When a photo essay is presented, its narrative approach dictates the choice of photographs to tell the best story in pictures, but not necessarily the most accurate or in-depth story on the subject.
The work of documentary photographers is not necessarily accompanied by text or captions, as it is usually presented as a long series. This does not mean that individual photographers cannot be both photojournalists and documentarians. One example is W. Eugene Smith. His Life magazine assignment Spanish Village (1951), which was expected to take only a few weeks, took several months to complete and resulted in a revolutionary work in that it abolished the traditional subordination of images to words.
Despite its lack of economic viability in the post-war period, documentary photography continued to develop in America and around the world. Disturbed by growing Americanisation, Latin American photographers directed their creativity towards constructing a visual identity and exposing social injustices. The Cuban Raúl Colares, for example, documented the development of the Cuban Revolution in 1959.
Many photographers focused on the indigenous peoples of South America, such as the Brazilian Claudia Andujar, who documented the Karajá people in the 1950s and began her Yanomami project in the 1970s. Spanish-born Pedro Mayer and Mexican Graciela Iturbide photographed Mexican folk rituals and culture in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s respectively. Japanese photographers also questioned their identity after defeat in the war. Themes of devastation emerged in works such as Shomei Tomatsu and Ken Domon’s “Hiroshima-Nagasaki Document” (1961). Influenced by Harry Callahan, the 1960s street photographs of the American-naturalised Japanese Yasuhiro Ishimoto convey a sense of self-deception and frivolity.
In Africa, the cameras were often turned on political issues. South Africans Ernest Cole and Peter Magubane documented the struggles against apartheid, while Mozambican Ricardo Rangel captured the nightlife of Maputo during the guerrilla resistance against colonisation in the 1960s. In the same decade, Czech photographer Josef Koudelka produced a major documentary on gypsies in Slovakia.
One of the most famous and influential post-war documentary projects, Robert Frank’s The Americans, had no overt political or social agenda. It was compiled by Swiss-born Frank as he travelled the United States documenting various everyday aspects of American society, living off a Guggenheim Fellowship he’d received in 1955. The ”American Dream”, which had been institutionalised in the immediate post-war years as a reward for the sacrifices of World War II.
Second World War sacrifices and used in advertising and other cultural messages to fuel the engines of postwar economic recovery, was not portrayed positively.
Frank’s images, with their harsh lighting and scenes dense with grain and evidence of their manufacture, also pointed harshly to a nation alienated by its own rampant consumerism. His resulting book, “The Americans” (1958), shocked critics and the American public alike and received an overwhelmingly negative response. Yet its snapshot aesthetic and critical vision opened a new way for younger generations.
William Klein’s “Life is Good and Good for You in New York” (1956), made in 1954-1955, was another highly influential private documentary project that initially received little support. An American expatriate living in France with a background in painting, Klein returned to his homeland and began a frenetic camerawork through the streets of Manhattan. Ignoring traditional ideals of sharpness, brightness and composition, Klein produced high-contrast and grainy images, with obvious blurring caused by movement and radical cropping, in an attempt to capture the anxieties of modernity.
Although Klein’s achievement was recognised in Europe, it took a long time for it to be appreciated in America. In different ways, Frank and Klein inaugurated a more subjective and corrosive way of depicting society that remains a powerful force in both documentary and fine art photography.
The 1960s was the decade in which documentary photography regained its strength and gained a wider audience. In 1962, Edward Steichen, still curator of photography at MoMA, organised “The Bitter Years 1935-1941: Rural America Seen by the Photographers of the FSA”, which introduced the work to a whole new generation. John Szarkowski, who replaced Steichen that same year, quickly demonstrated his preference for a more subjective form of documentary photography. One of the milestones of the documentary revival was his 1967 exhibition “New Documents”, which featured the work of Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander.
According to Szarkowski, their similarity lay in the blend of street documentary photography and psychological investigation. This tendency is most dramatic in the photographs of Diane Arbus.
Arbus’s large body of work, most of which was produced in the 1950s and 1960s, does not follow a thematic structure, but is best remembered for her images of subcultures considered odd by traditional society, such as transvestites, homosexuals and dwarfs. Inspired by Weegee and with a nod to Brassai, Arbus projected her own internal conflicts through her images, choosing subjects that were at odds with the institutionalised glamour of those decades. Like Frank and Klein before her, she enhanced her expression through technical means, using hard flash. Although personal and subjective, her portraits also captured certain cultural behaviours.
Strongly influenced by the work of Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander’s imagery has been seen as a ”merciless mirror” of American society. His television photographs, juxtapositions and self-portraits – usually presented through shadows and reflections – convey a sense of displacement, reflecting the distance and anonymity of modernity. On the other hand, the inclusion of his own representation was intended to remind the viewer that a photograph is a constructed image. Garry Winogrand saw a photograph as a new fact in the world, not a mere restatement of an existing fact. Also an admirer of Frank’s “The Americans” and making extensive use of the snapshot aesthetic, Winogrand, through a massive project of capturing seemingly insignificant moments and ordinary subjects, created a psychologically complex body of work that goes a long way towards capturing the intangibles of culture.
The casual, almost sterile depiction of subtle atmospheres and ordinary people or situations that Szarkowski championed had already been explored in 1967 in an exhibition at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, “12 Photographers of the American Social Landscape” and the 1966 exhibition at the George Eastman House, Rochester, New York, “Toward a Social Landscape”, which included Lee Friedlander. Derived from the idea of “private realities”, a highly subjective approach to social issues present in the street documentaries of Harry Callahan in the 1940s, “social landscape” was quickly codified as a new documentary approach in which the individual projected his or her own psychological reality onto society, finding resonances between the private and the public that were valuable to others seeking to understand their own relationship to society.
In the 1970s, capturing the “social landscape” evolved into an impersonal documentation of the suburban landscape in a kind of modern echo of nineteenth-century images of the American West. This tendency was showcased in the influential 1975 Eastman House exhibition “New Topographics – Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape”. As demonstrated by the works of Lewis Baltz, Frank Gohlke and Robert Adams, among others, this tendency linked documentary photography to conceptual art. The genre was further expanded by William Eggleston.
Inspired by Friedlander and Winogrand, Eggleston used colour photography, long considered the realm of the amateur or the advertising image, to capture banal images of everyday life and to represent, among other things, the loss of identity of American cities. His MoMA exhibition in 1976 reinforced this style and confirmed the documentary potential of colour photography.
In the 1970s and 1980s, a very different kind of documentary photography emerged, using snapshot-like images similar to family photographs, in which the images were literally private, with no claim on the part of their makers to combine the private and the public in an instructive way. Including graphic violence and sexual imagery, Larry Clark’s book ‘Tulsa’ (1973), a portrait of drug-addicted teenagers, including friends, acquaintances and those with whom he had grown up, and Nan Goldin’s slide show ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ (1986) of her friends, lovers and her own troubled relationships, after initially shocking became cult items and later mainstream classics.
Social documentary also gained, in the 1960s, with new sources of government funding, notably the National Endowment for the Arts, established in 1965. Increased foundation and private support, as well as the greater involvement of photojournalists, who developed projects on their own and sometimes reported on them for the press, further expanded the field. Danny Lyon and Bruce Davidson, for example, were commissioned to cover the civil rights movements of the 1960s and continued to document related issues independently.
Lyon focused on the lives of those excluded from mainstream society, as in “The Bikeriders” (1968), a study of the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club to which he belonged, and “Conversations with the Dead” (1971), which depicted the inmates of the Texas State Penitentiary. Davidson moved through various aspects of society, notably black life as captured in “East 100th Street” (1966-1970), the peculiarities of “underground life” in “Subway” (1986), and “Central Park” (1995), which explored the open space within urban life.
But regardless of financial or social circumstances, certain photojournalists will always seek to develop their work to a greater extent and depth than news photography allows. The Americans Gordon Parks and Eugene Richards, the British Philip Jones Griffiths, the Czech Antonin Kratochvil, the French Henri Cartier-Bresson and Raymond Depardon, the Russian Georgi Pinkasov and the Indian Raghubir Singh are some of the other remarkable photojournalists and documentarians who have produced numerous self-motivated projects. Brazilian Sebastião Salgado, one of the most renowned photographers, first came to international attention with his dramatic news photograph of the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981. But Salgado is first and foremost a social documentarian in the tradition of Riis and Hine, exhaustively documenting what he sees as the great problems of the twentieth century – the ravages of war, the brutality of life in underdeveloped countries and the plight of children.
Today, the definition of documentary photography embraces a multiplicity of directions, ranging from portrait to landscape, from factual to allegorical, from crisp to darkly grainy, from social to psychological, from neutral to authorial, with major implications for conceptual photography and other contemporary art forms. This is particularly evident in the acceptance of certain photographers in the field of contemporary art, which supersedes their reputation in the world of photography. Examples include the Germans Bernd and Hilla Becher with their cool industrial photographs (who were included in the New Topographics exhibition in 1975) or Thomas Struth’s clinical urban landscapes. What is common to all trends, and a fundamental tenet of the genre, is the figurative and systematic recording of a subject through images that are grounded in reality but not reduced to proof or absolute truth.

Susana Paiva