extremely sharp close-ups of natural and man-
made things of beauty—received recognition and
became the new model of the serious photogra-
pher for his apparently impersonal description of
the world. At the same time, some American
straight photography was shown in the seminal
Film und Fotoexhibition of 1929 in Stuttgart,
allowing German critics to project the aspiration
of objectivity onto this work as well. In fact, sev-
eral years earlier, the ideals of directness and sim-
plicity had already been pointed out in European
journals as an American issue; many American
photographers had been turning away from arti-
fice and creating simpler forms of expression
based on sharpness and elegant geometry as evi-
denced by the publication of Paul Strand’s photo-
graphs as early as 1916 in Stieglitz’s influential
journalCamera Work. This journal, which had
been a proponent of Pictorialism for many years
and had in fact helped spread this style worldwide,
now helped disseminate the notion that ‘‘straight
photography’’ was the new, modern mode.
Although none of the achievements of the practi-
tioners of this new style had at that time been
thought of as documentary, later many were, like
Weston’s Mexican folk art images, and their impor-
tance remains as a significant step in the direction of
documentary photography. The discovery and wider
distribution of Atget’s oeuvre in the second half of
the 1920s and, a bit later, of Sander’s, also worked
to question existing photographic ideology.
Another factor decisive for the establishment and
growth of the documentary form was the launching
of documentary films.Nanook of the North(1922), a
diary of the lives of Canadian Eskimos by the Amer-
ican filmmaker Robert Flaherty, encountered great
success, motivating the big studios to produce films
of this kind. Soviet Dziga Vertov, creator ofMan
withaMovieCamera(1929), stated that he was the
‘‘film-eye,’’ suggesting that his films showed what
and how the eyes see, that is, life as it is. The term
‘‘documentary’’ as a definition of a genre appeared
in 1926 in a review on Flaherty’s Moana(1926)
written by the British theorist and filmmaker John
Grierson. Similar usage of the term in photography
was first applied in 1928 in France and Germany, as
affirmed by the French historian Olivier Lugon in
his meticulous book Le Style Documentaire:
D’August Sander aWalker Evans—1920– 1945 (2001), and around 1930 in the United States. ‘‘Documentary’’ in fact became a tendency in diverse fields such as the social sciences, literature, and art throughout this era as one legitimated the other. Gisele Freund asserts in her classic book
Photographie et Societe ́(1974) that although the
official recognition and public announcement of
photography was in January of 1839, this was thir-
teen years after Joseph Nice ́phore Nie ́pce’s devel-
opment of a primitive photographic process. She
argues it was only then that photography met a
‘‘social element,’’ that theretofore had been absent,
which allowed its successful reception; in other
words, it was when society was ready to accept it
that photography was ‘‘invented.’’ It can be argued
that the 1930s were the equivalent moment for
documentary photography, meeting its social ele-
ment in the form of the economic disaster of 1929
known as the Great Depression.
As part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New
Deal, the Resettlement Administration (RA), later
named Farm Security Administration (FSA), was
founded in 1935. Its Historical Unit, a small photo-
graphic group, had the aim of providing visual
documentation that justified the Government’s
relief and make-work programs and helped the
urban public to understand the poverty and diffi-
culties of the rural populations. Roy Stryker, a
former economics teacher with little experience of
photography, was named director of the project.
Although Stryker wrote ‘‘scripts’’ directing what he
expected the assignments to achieve, the FSA
photographers including Walker Evans, Dorothea
Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee, and Arthur Roth-
stein, had a great deal of freedom in the manner in
which they photographed. Evans and Lange, who
have been pointed out by historian John Szar-
kowski as being responsible in great part for
FSA’s success, used the agency structure to develop
their own projects and documentary ideals. Lange’s
work was clearly humanitarian, centered on peo-
ple’s presence and emotional expressions, which
she believed could be socially and politically useful.
Evans used the opposite tack with his highly imper-
sonal style to document ordinary things and when
he did photograph people, they were presented as
anonymous and interchangeable.
Walker Evans’s style came to dominate the idea of
what documentary photography should be, as ‘‘pur-
ist’’ ideas began to dominate photography circles
and extend the prohibitions on manipulation of the
photographic image to the act of shooting the photo-
graphic image. After a short stay in Europe, Evans
returned to New York in 1929 willing to employ the
experimental precepts of the New Vision, but soon
after, influenced by Atget’s work, he took up a
simpler aesthetic. He concentrated on vernacular
architecture, first independently and then by com-
mission, the results comprising the first solo photo-
graphy exhibition mounted at MoMA in 1933, and
in 1938 a selection from it was integrated into hisDOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY