DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY
Photography’s inclination for documentation was
recognized since—or even before—its inception,
and even though documentary photography as a
genre originated at the end of the nineteenth-cen-
tury, the term was first widely applied in the 1930s
when it in fact dominated the photographic scene.
Developed mainly in the United States during the
second half of the decade, the style was influenced
by the emergence of documentary cinema and sev-
eral government-sponsored projects, most centrally
the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which
engendered a style that then became widely imi-
tated. As most of those projects were socially
oriented, this contributed to the misconception
that documentary photography necessarily em-
braced a social aspect as a basic precept.
Most literature on the topic also deals with the
work of this period and introduces a variety of classi-
fications in an attempt to conceptualize the genre
based on the peculiarities of this historical moment.
Nevertheless documentary photography did evolve
throughout the twentieth century, as did its definition,
which today involves a broader sense and direction
than mere recording of life with the aim of objectivity
in order to educate others or elucidate a truth.
Despite being perceived early on as a tool to
explain different cultures, until the end of the nine-
teenth century photography was most frequently
used to simply respond to an interest in the pictur-
esque. Those images were common idealizations
composed in tableaux-like scenes with backdrops,
often presented on acartes-de-visiteform—a sort
of predecessor of the postcard. Displaying laborers,
street people, and views of distant foreign lands, they
served mostly as souvenirs. Some long-term projects
were initiated and even though they cannot be truly
called documentary, they can be seen as establishing
the tenets of its traditional approach. Among them
are David Octavius Hill’s and Robert Adamson’s
fishermen images from 1845 made in Newhaven,
Scotland; Henry Mayhew’s 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’s and
William Henry Jackson’s geographical and geologi-
cal surveys of the American West in the 1870s, and
John Thompson’sIllustration of China and Its Peo-
ple, from the same decade.
With the coming of the twentieth century, photo-
graphers became more concerned in capturing van-
ishing customs as well as in tracing a parallel
between past and present, embodied in numerous
projects carried out in the United States that focused
on Native Americans. Edward Curtis’s project,
begun in 1900, consumed 30 years of his life with
trips throughout the United States to Indian settle-
ments. Yet his work is controversial in terms of
documentation both for romanticizing the Indians
as the ‘‘other’’ as well as for staging his photographs
to capture aspects, such as the costumes or ceremo-
nies, of these communities that were long gone at the
point that he photographed them.
In 1889, theBritish Journal of Photographysta-
ted that a comprehensive photographic archive of
the world should be created for its valuable future
as documents. Historically seen as evidence and a
means of investigation, fused with a growing social
reform movement in the late 1800s, photography
became an essential element in these campaigns,
which were often played out in the fast growing
arena of the illustrated press. Its development as a
tool for social reform, however, was directly related
to its technical evolution. As drawings and wood
engravings were not realistic enough, the urgency
for further and inexpensive advances of photo
reproduction resulted in the invention of halftone
printing in the 1880s. The invention of the hand-
held camera and their increasing availability in
1870–1880 enabled the capturing of candid photo-
graphs; from then on photography gradually inte-
grated the printed media.
The Danish immigrant Jacob Riis was one of the
first in the United States to put photography at the
service for social betterment. Disturbed by the living
conditions of immigrants in the 1879s in New York,
Riis, a police news reporter, wrote long and detailed
articles. Accused of exaggeration, he started to use
photography as proof of his claims and as a way to
influence public opinion. Yet to reproduce these
photographs, photogravures had to be made, and
the ‘‘documents,’’ still appearing to be drawings,
were received with the same skepticism. It was onlyDOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY