and subjects with greater aesthetic appeal were incor-
porated, attracting photographers known for their
advanced fine-art aesthetics like Ansel Adams and
Edward Weston. In 1947, The Photo League was
harassed as a subversive Communist organization,
andwasdisbandedin1951.
In Germany as the political situation in the Wei-
mar Republic grew more complex, the admiration of
American straight photography transformed, in the
eyes of some, a figure such as Renger-Patzch into
someone who had sold out and adopted a foreign
tendency. The conservatives, who idealized the
representation of an authentic German ‘‘soul,’’ criti-
cized the New Objectivity movement for being mod-
ernist and internationalist. The leftists decried the
same movement as superficial and reflecting bour-
geois triviality and called for more socially relevant
photographic work. At the end of the 1920s, Renger-
Patzch turned to documenting open views of indus-
trial landscapes. This more systematic approach that
demonstrated a greater distance from the subject
with the idea of thus being more ‘‘objective’’ struck
a receptive chord. A peculiarly German style of
documentary photography was emerging. Sander
surfaced as its epithet in early 1930. Atget’s oeuvre
was, as in America, pointed out as a model.
The rise of the Nazis in 1933 immobilized free
debate and artistic expression with its pernicious
ideology and its adaptation of an exaggerated doc-
umentary style as propaganda (Socialist Realism).
The development of the documentary genre was
not completely stopped, however. Roman Vish-
niac, exiled in Berlin from the Soviet Union, docu-
mented the Jewish Ghettos of Poland. Sander, who
saw his bookAntlitz der Zeitremoved from the
market and his plates destroyed, persisted with
the documentation of landscapes.
In the 1920s and 1930s, leftist European and
Russian photographers concerned with their coun-
tries’ economic-political scenes and inspired by the
‘‘documentary truth’’ or agitprop of Alexander
Rodchenko and El Lissitzky photomontages,
turned to urban documentation. In an attempt to
make the working classes aware of their deprived
conditions and political power, they formed the
worker photography movement, which operated
in countries like the Netherlands, Belgium, and
England in a diversity of styles. This movement
was particularly successful in England and is
known as the Mass Observation project (MO),
which had the intention of producing anthropolo-
gical-like documentaries. In the 1930s, the British
photographer Bill Brandt, despite not taking part in
the MO movement and having been involved with
Surrealism, effectively documented the contrasts
among classes and the lives of mine workers.
During this same period, Mexico’s capital was an
international center for artistic and intellectual
exchange, benefiting from the political turmoil in
Europe by welcoming its artists, writers, and intel-
lectuals. Encouraged by governmental support and
the presence of Edward Weston, Paul Strand, and
Tina Modotti, a number of photographers em-
barked on a series of documentary projects in
the modernist style. Mexico’s most famous photo-
grapher, Manuel A ́lvarez Bravo, at the beginning
of his career in the 1920s, had experimented with
abstraction. During the 1930s, he created Modernist
images and documented Mexican life, religious cul-
ture, and landscapes. Bravo’s photographic journey
was duplicated by others all over the world. In Oli-
vier Lugon’s words, the ‘‘growing dominance of the
genre was an institutionalized form of political and
social reaction.’’
During the 1930s and 1940s, the definitions of
documentary approach were malleable and varied
according to personal or cultural tendencies and
interests of the moment, and at times were even
contradictory. Documentary photography was
thought to be impartial and simply instructive yet
able to convince and move the viewer. After mov-
ing toward a cooler, nonauthoritative approach, it
was supposed to become more emotional and per-
sonal, preferably compassionate and humanistic;
when capturing social conditions it first was
meant to focus on its hardships and later on its
positive aspects; it shifted also from presentation
with no supporting text to an almost compulsory
pairing of image with text, as documentary photo-
graphy began to be merged with the notion of the
photo essay, coming closer to photojournalism and
progressively losing its dominance. The rising
demand for photojournalistic-based projects fueled
by the flourishing of magazines such asLifeand
the decline of governmental sponsorship and com-
missioning of documentary projects in the 1940s
forced many documentarians to shift to news
photography. Documentary photography receded
in production and importance throughout the
1940s and 1950s.
There remains a common misunderstanding
about what divides documentary photography
and photojournalism. Both produce documents in
a historical sense and are based on existing (‘‘real’’)
circumstances and issues. Photojournalism, how-
ever, is basically factual and has supposed testimo-
nial status as a matter of its own ethics while the
documentary image can also be allegorical and notDOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY