in the United States or totalitarian as in the Soviet
Union, Italy, and Germany.
This concern took different forms. Photojournal-
ism, for want of a better word, was one of them and
went beyond the simple news photograph. Documen-
tary photography tackled projects of a larger nature.
This started in Germany, with theBerliner Illu-
strirte Zeitungand theMu ̈nchner Illustrierte Presse,
which developed ‘‘picture stories’’ and commis-
sioned images from photographers such as Erich
Salomon (1886–1944) or Felix H. Man (1893–
1985) (a series on Italian dictator Mussolini’s daily
life). Few were trained photographers but many
had studied the humanities in university. The taking
of power by the Nazi party in 1933 led to the
disbanding of the creative groups around the maga-
zines and the dissemination of operators and edi-
tors throughout Europe, thus giving birth to a wide
variety of illustrated publications elsewhere. The
form also reached the United States, with the crea-
tion ofFortune(1930),Lifein 1936 by Henry Luce,
andLookin 1937. France had its own, withMatch
(1926) and Lucien Vogel’sVu(1928), a more poli-
tically committed publication.Vuhired photogra-
phers such as Kerte ́sz, Germaine Krull (1897–
1985), Brassaı ̈, and Robert Capa (1913–1954). In
his magazine work Kerte ́sz explored daily life in the
city and in the country, with a general tone of criti-
cism towards the dehumanizing trend of modern
life, but mostly emphasizing the paradoxes and
strange encounters in an ironic manner close to
surrealism. Brassaı ̈, for his part, specialized in
night life and the underworld, looking at the city
as a large stage where characters pass. In England,
Bill Brandt chronicled English life (The English at
Home, 1936) as well as London by night (A Night in
London, 1938).
More systematic, and less geared towards the
press, larger documentary works are one of the dis-
tinctive marks of the period. Documentarians used
the collection power of the photographic image,
which had already been perceived in the great sur-
veys of the nineteenth century, and coupled it with
new increased means of dissemination.
In Germany, after the Great War, near Cologne, a
professional photographer named August Sander
began what he planned to be a survey of the German
people of the period. The project was so vast and
comprehensive that it took years to complete and
was published in various installments. His aim was
precisely to reflect the society of the twentieth century
(one of the names of the series was ‘‘Men of the
Twentieth Century’’) thanks to the ‘‘purity’’ of the
camera. He set up a simple protocol that he stuck to
methodically, posing the sitter in his work environ-
ment, positioning the subject to face the photogra-
pher, and capturing the subject’s full body. The
survey was organized according to the occupation
of the sitter, the only identity provided by the caption.
But collective operations were the most important
ones and the survey that had the deepest effect on the
future of photography was undoubtedly that of the
Farm Security Administration in the United States.
More than its hiring of Walker Evans, Dorothea
Lange (1895–1965), or Ben Shahn (1898–1969), and
its training of several young men and women who
were to become major players in the field of huma-
nistic photography in the post war years, the FSA,
under the direction of Roy Stryker (1893–1976), was
significant in its structured and coherent attempt at
constructing a full picture of American society of the
era. This was accomplished not by using portraits of
its people, but by showing them in their daily environ-
ment and, if necessary, expressing, by visual means the
‘‘essence’’ of the situation. Placing the responsibility
on the shoulders of the photographer/reporter and his
necessary honesty, and presenting the result in the
form of an organized file of images and documents,
the FSA inaugurated a new relationship between the
photographer and the world. Stryker’s commitment
was not one of his own opinion but one of his own
conviction, that of the faith in the people and the
fundamental need for a democracy to give a voice to
their existence. Such a complex interplay makes the
work of the FSA the great laboratory of the modern
image, and the place where all the contradictions of
representation in a mass culture are at play.The Effect of Technique
Most of the developments already cited would not
have been possible without radical evolutions in the
technical capabilities of the camera, film, and print-
ing processes. The creation of the small camera,
Oscar Barnack’s Leica (c. 1925), using cinema film
and made possible by the improvement in lenses
and fine-grain developers, enlarged the field of the
‘‘photographable’’ with its maniability, its unobtru-
siveness, and the possibility to create multiple expo-
sures. As with all epistemological breaks, it took a
while to percolate, and was first taken up—under-
standably—by non-professional photographers.
Inevitably, alongside the technical perfection
sought by some—especially American—photogra-
phers, a new type of image, grainier, rougher, with
harsher contrasts, more stylized, and ‘‘wrenched
from the world’’ as it were, became accepted. Prac-
tical and affordable color film also made its debut.
Color photography remained for the most part lim-
ited to the world of advertising because of cost, butHISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY: INTERWAR YEARS