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maintained in the way that mud sticks. But as the
distinction between nineteenth- and later twentieth-
century practice suggests, it is a notion with its own
history. After the medium was invented towards the
end of the 1830s, there was sheer pleasure taken in
the ability to simply document things, a process that
before had relied on laborious drawing. The potential
of bringing to European consciousness the facts of
foreign climes was soon realised, leading to the work
of Francis Firth, Charles Clifford, John Thomson et
al. The ‘empire struck back’ in the form of colonial
photographers such as Carleton Watkins in the US,
Walter Woodbury in Australia and the likes of James
Bragge in New Zealand, who were keen to impress
with romantic views of pure nature and evidence of
material progress so far from ‘Home’.
The medium’s then untapped capacity for
changing minds in all this documenting came with
Jacob Riis’s New York slum pictures and Lewis
Hine’s images of child labour late in the nineteenth
century, which led to a movement lasting several
decades by photographers concerned with injustice
and social conditions, a movement with which the
term ‘documentary’ is most associated, even now.
A line might run, ‘injustice and social conditions
are all very well, but what have they to do with
art?’^7 However, during the 1960s—the very time of
Turner’s Johnsonville series—this association between
the social and documentary began to change: there
remained a connection, but the approach and
views of the photographers became much more
personal, a trend expanding today. Reference to one
photographer will illustrate the present situation:
Tim J. Veling’s 2008 Pre-marital Bliss series^8 —
documenting the sometimes gritty details of his
domestic circumstances which brings some reality to