when Riis used his photographs in slide projector
lectures and his publicationHow the Other Half
Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York
(1890) came out—in which 17 of the images were
halftones—that he convinced Americans to take
action. Even though Riis was a photojournalist, his
work can be considered social documentary as he
developed a straightforward and methodical, record-
ing of a subject with humanitarian concern.
Especially famous for photographing immigrants
in the beginning of the twentieth century, specifically
children and youths put to backbreaking labor,
Lewis Hine began his involvement in photography
when teaching natural science at a New York school.
It quickly became clear to Hine that photography
could be a powerful tool to fight prejudice against
immigrants. In 1904, he began his first documenta-
tion on the immigrants of Ellis Islands. Three years
later and for a decade he concentrated his efforts on
child labor; his celebrated images of children, often
dirty and with forlorn expressions on their faces,
standing close to machinery generated, through
their sense of scale, a feeling that they were indeed
very young. Hine called his images ‘‘photo-interpre-
tations’’ referring to his creative decisions and to the
dual aim to inform and move the viewer. Published
as ‘‘human documents’’ and widely distributed in
pamphlets, magazines, and books, as well as shown
in slide projections and exhibitions, Hine’s photo-
graphs in fact achieved the institution of federal
legislation regulating child labor. Riis and Hine
together are considered the pioneers of social doc-
umentary photography.
The photographic scene was dominated by Pictori-
alism from the end of the nineteenth century until the
first years of the 1920s, a movement that produced
highly manipulated images intended as fine art. Some
photographers, largely overlooked at the time but
who took exception to this style, later became emble-
matic documentarians. After brilliantly documenting
his homeland of Hungary during World War I,
Andre ́ Kerte ́sz moved to Paris in 1925, where he
joined the artistic community and began a photojour-
nalistic career. He then relocated to New York in
1936 where he worked for the next 25 years as a
commercial photographer. Kerte ́sz’s contemporary
reputation is mostly as a street photographer, since
he never stopped documenting the ordinary in street
life during his spare time, and it is for this work he is
one of the most admired photographers of the twen-
tieth century. Euge`ne Atget’s life is little known but
his oeuvre is legendary. His records of the streets,
shop windows, and historical buildings of Paris
were initially sold as ‘‘documents pour artistes’’ (docu-
ments for artists) to painters who used them as guide-
lines for their work. When discovered by the
Surrealists—who saw his images as fragments of rea-
lity free of cultural intentions and thus open to sub-
jective interpretations—Atget saw a few of his images
published in 1926 inLa Re ́volution Surrealistemaga-
zine. A year later, when he died, the American photo-
grapher Berenice Abbott bought his complete work,
introducing and promoting it in the United States in
the 1930s. In 1968, it was purchased by the Museum
of Modern Art of New York (MoMA), and finally,
in the 1980s, Atget was definitively established as a
leading master of photography.
The German August Sander, a commercial stu-
dio photographer, had already started, in the very
beginning of the 1920s, his ambitious project
Menschen des 20 Jahrhunderts. This self-assigned
project consisted of documenting people of all
classes and occupations, and including some of
his early commissioned portraits dating from the
1910s when he first developed the idea. Yet
acknowledgment of his achievement came much
later with the publication of his bookAntlitz der
Zeit(Face of Our Time) in 1929. A selection of 60
portraits, it inspired enthusiastic critics who ranked
him at the top of documentary photography. Influ-
ential philosopher Walter Benjamin for one
regarded Sander’s photographs highly and wrote
about them in hisKleine Geschichte der Photogra-
phie(1931), a milestone for photography theory.
In the 1920s, as the dominance of Pictorialism
began to fade, photographic practice in general
moved closer to the idea of document, denying
manipulation, soft focus, or retouching, and seek-
ing to explore the purity of the medium. As mod-
ernism spread around the world, a straightforward
approach in photography became the rule, but not
without engendering contradictory interpretations.
Influenced by the Russian Constructivists, the
Hungarian-born La ́szlo ́Moholy-Nagy, then teach-
ing at the Bauhaus in Weiner, Germany, in the late
1920s, theorized in his bookVon Material zu Archi-
tecktur(1929, translated as theThe New Vision
1932), which would expand and free human per-
ception through pure photography. The recom-
mended wide angles, innovative perspectives, and
innovative use of materials, however, did not
inspire a documentary, but a more experimental
outlook. TheNeue Sachlichkeit(New Objectivity)
of the German avant-garde, as exemplified by
Albert Renger-Patzch, and the American ‘‘straight
photography’’ of Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz,
Edward Steichen, and Edward Weston, among
others, tried to rediscover simplicity and austerity
as a descriptive tendency. Renger-Patzch, already
known for his bookDie Welt ist Scho ̈n(1928)—DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY