427
were commissioned by the Glasgow Improvement Trust
in the 1860s were stark in their dissimilarity to other
graphic representations of poverty, due to the exacting
detail and the matter of fact gazes of the subjects, who
are, after all, like the natives of other places that pho-
tographers were traveling to in that decade.
After he returned from the Far East, John Thompson
expanded his interest in people and customs to his native
London, publishing Street Life in London in 1877. To
a modern eye, Thompson’s images look the most like
candid snapshots of the twentieth century, despite the
fact that he would have been a conspicuous fi gure in the
streets with his cumbersome equipment.
Jacob Riis, a Danish born news reporter without
photographic training, took up the camera to reinforce
his advocacy of the slum dwellers of New York’s Lower
East Side. Because of the speed and preparation and
execution, pictures of this urban milieu seem compo-
sitionally spare and drawing upon minute details that
are discovered through assertive examination. Riis’ aim
was to mobilize the public to take up the plight of the
poor through his books like How the Other Half Lives
(1890).
Riis’ work was the counter opposite of Oscar Rej-
lander, who endeavored to capture the Victorian senti-
mentality of street urchins for the marketplace. There
were no qualms on his part of stage managing these
tableaus and portraits in his studio and was unapologetic
about their theatricality.
Paul Martin, a former engraver, made truly candid
photographs in the 1890s by concealing his portable
camera in a parcel. In that way, the impression is that
of a cinematic “slice of life,” something that prefi gures
the work of the great documentarians of the twentieth
century.
Even in the age of the daguerreotype, photography
was immediately partnered with medical science as
an essential recording device. The fi rst micrographs
were taken by John Benjamin Dancer, and although an
atlas of engravings based upon micrographs by Jean
Bernard Foucault was issued in Paris in 1845, it was
later improvements in lenses and shutters that catalyzed
this union. Photographs were used to illustrate medical
conditions as a matter of course by the late 1850s, and
visual symptoms of diseases were recorded for refer-
ence, and already an established aspect of the practice
by 1870.
Photographs of the appearance of mental patients
were made by Hugh Welch Diamond starting in 1852,
and lantern slides were even employed therapeutically
for the entertainment of mental patients in the Philadel-
phia Hospital for the Insane.
The medical photographic experiments of Duchenne
de Boulogne, a Paris neurologist who published a semi-
nal text on physiognomy, were well known to Charles
Darwin, who was acquainted with photographers Julia
Margaret Cameron and Rejlander, from whom he com-
missioned photographs as evidence of his own inquiries
into human physiology. It is Darwin that most historians
consider the fi rst scientist to have used photographs as
the basis for a published theory.
Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, a leading biological
scientist, endeavored to gather statistical data from
quantities of photographs, but there was not yet a uni-DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY
O’ Sullivan, Timothy. Field Where
General Reynolds Fell, Gettysburg.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Gilman Collection, Purchase, Ann
Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift,
2005 [2005.100.502.1 (37)] Image ©
The Metropolitan Museum of Art.