American Photographsbook and exhibition, also at
MoMA. Hired by the FSA in 1935, Evans pursued
his idea of documenting American society through
the everyday environment that gave evidence of but
showed no human interaction, like shop windows,
advertising signs, and the vernacular architecture.
Evans’s work, along with Sander’s, thus consti-
tutes a distinct style within documentary photogra-
phy, presenting images as ‘‘types’’ meant to evoke
larger thought rather than inviting the viewer to
concentrate on particularities and develop empathy
for the individual or circumstance depicted. Evans
himself considered the term ‘‘documentary’’ de-
ceiving and suggested in the 1970s that the right
term should be ‘‘documentary style.’’ By presenting
an aesthetic frequently identified as ‘‘anti-aes-
thetic,’’ these bodies of work set up their own
theoretical concepts. Embodying the ideals of neu-
trality and ‘‘straight photography’s’’ formal quali-
ties, such as frontality, emphasis on sharpness and
brightness, presentation of static elements and
balanced compositions with each detail of equal
importance to another, the ability of the image to
stand on its own without captions or explanations,
and presentation of images in series, Evans and
Sander created a documentary approach that per-
haps too closely mimics actual photo documents.
For example, they have been accused of creating
works with no more quality than passport pictures.
John Grierson clarified, albeit in relation to film,
that ‘‘documentary was from the beginning...an
‘anti-aesthetic’ movement...what confuses the his-
tory is that we had always the good sense to use the
aesthetes. ...We mastered the techniques necessary
for our unaesthetic purposes.’’
As John Szarkowski, whose vision of what photo-
graphy should be powerfully shaped the postwar
aesthetic, wrote ‘‘pictures that would look ingenuous
and free of guile, that would seem not merely honest
but artless...[were] of course an aesthetic choice and
an artistic strategy.’’ While the photo document has
a strict informational value that was long used to
deny that these sorts of photographs could be art,
often by the photographers themselves, the docu-
mentary style embodies the idea of documentary
photography having different possibilities of use
and interpretation. Atget’s work is a common exam-
ple of this attitude, even though it is almost certain
he was not aware of its potential as an artistic
expression and captured his Parisian images because
he felt they would not be available for him to enjoy
in person as the years passed and progress inevitably
changed the face of the city he so loved.
Yet the notions of what constitute a ‘‘documen-
tary style’’ or aesthetic in the realm of fine-arts
photography are not necessarily what documentary
photography signifies to the larger public, nor were
the finer points of the debate of particular interest as
photographs continued to be exponentially con-
sumed by society. In mid-century, it was commonly
held that all photographs tell the ‘‘truth’’ and some
photographs tell stories, and that the stories as pre-
sented in the photographs were in fact accurate and
fair, a covenant of faith that was developed by the
social documentarians early in the century. After
Lange and Evans left the FSA, in 1940 and 1937,
respectively, they continued documenting their own
projects. While Lange worked on the unjust intern-
ment of Japanese-Americans in camps following the
attack on Pearl Harbor, Evans embarked on a pro-
ject with the writer James Agee that resulted in the
notorious bookLet Us Now Praise Famous Men
(1941). A study of Alabama tenant farmers, this
project became a basic text of the civil rights
movement later in the century. The FSA project
continued to produce the most comprehensive
documentation of America to date, despite its pro-
pagandistic intentions, contributing to the estab-
lishment of documentary photography as a genre
and inspiring countless other projects.
Whereas initially documentary photography
called up images of rural life, the urban scene was
being documented concurrently by Berenice Ab-
bott and the photographers of New York’s The
Photo League. Abbot, who had a commercial stu-
dio in Paris, returned to New York in 1927, initially
shooting, as did Evans, under the influence of the
New Vision. Later she adopted Atget’s path, and
attempted to do in New York what Atget did in
Paris. The resulting Changing New York, 1935–
1939 was developed under the auspices of the Art
Project of the Works Progress Administration.
The Film and Photo League was formed in 1930,
and reorganized in 1936 as The Photo League. A
group of politically committed photographers who
idealized Lewis Hine joined together in order to
support working-class rights—an extension of the
German worker photography movement—through
the documentation of the life and everyday struggles
of the common man. Its board of directors included
luminaries such as Berenice Abbott, Paul Strand, W.
Eugene Smith, and Nancy and Beaumont Newhall.
One of its most extensive projects was The Harlem
Document, photographed by various Photo League
members under the direction of Aaron Siskind
between 1932 and 1940 that captured life in this
changing African-American neighborhood. In the
1940s, when there was a general tendency toward a
personalized approach, the themes considered accep-
table to the goals of The Photo League broadenedDOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY