wider distribution. In 1962, Edward Steichen, still
curator of photography at MoMA, organizedThe
Bitter Years 1935–1941: Rural America Seen by the
Photographers of the FSA, introducing this work to a
whole new generation. John Szarkowski, who
replaced Steichen that same year, quickly demon-
strated his predilection for a subjective kind of doc-
umentary photography. One of the milestones of the
documentary revival was his 1967 exhibitionNew
Documents, which showcased the works of Diane
Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander.
According to Szarkowski, their similarity resided in
the blending of street documentary photography and
psychological investigation. This tendency is at its
most dramatic in the photographs of Diane Arbus.
Producing most of her work in the 1950s and 1960s,
Arbus’s large oeuvre did not obey any thematic
structure, but is remembered mostly for her images
of subcultures considered odd by traditional society,
like transvestites, homosexuals, and dwarfs. Inspired
byWeegeeandwithanodtoBrassaı ̈, Arbus pro-
jected her own internal conflicts through her images
by choosing subjects that were opposed to the insti-
tutionalized glamour of those decades. She, like
Frank and Klein before her, enhanced her expres-
sion through technical means by use of hard flash.
Although personal and subjective, her portraits at
the same time captured certain cultural behaviors.
Greatly influenced by Robert Frank’s work, Lee
Friedlander’s imagery was seen as a ‘‘merciless mir-
ror’’ of American society. His television photo-
graphs, juxtapositions, and self-portraits—mostly
presented by shadows and reflections—transmit a
feeling of displacement, reflecting the distancing
and anonymity of modern time. On the other hand,
the inclusion of his own representation was meant to
remind the viewer that a photograph is a constructed
image. Garry Winogrand considered a photograph
to be a new fact in the world, not a mere restatement
of an existing fact. Also admiring Frank’sThe Amer-
icansand making wide use of the snapshot aesthetic,
Winogrand shaped, through a massive project of
recording of seemingly insignificant moments and
ordinary subjects, a psychologically complex oeuvre
that goes a long way toward capturing the intangi-
bles of culture.
The depiction of subtle ambiences and ordinary
people or situations in a casual, almost sterile way
so championed by Szarkowski, had been defined
earlier in 1967 in an exhibition at the Rose Art
Museum, Brandeis University in Waltham, Massa-
chusetts,12 Photographers of the American Social
Landscapeand the George Eastman House, Roche-
ster, New York 1966 exhibitionToward a Social
Landscape, which included Lee Friedlander, among
others. ‘‘Social landscape’’ derived from the idea of
‘‘private realities,’’ a highly subjective approach
toward social issues that is present in the street
documentations of Harry Callahan of the 1940s,
and was quickly codified as a new documentary
approach by which the individual projected his or
her own psychological reality onto society, finding
resonances between private and public that were
valuable to others seeking to understand their
own relationship to society.
In the 1970s, the capturing of ‘‘social landscape’’
evolved into an impersonal documentation of the
suburbia landscape in a sort of modern echo of nine-
teenth century American West imagery. This ten-
dency was presented at Eastman House’s influential
1975 exhibitionNew Topographics—Photographs of
a Man-Altered Landscape.As demonstrated by the
works of Lewis Baltz, Frank Gohlke, and Robert
Adams, among others, this tendency connected doc-
umentary photography to Conceptual Art. The
genre was further expanded by William Eggleston.
Inspired by Friedlander and Winogrand, Eggleston
used color photography, long considered the realm
of the amateur or the advertising image, to capture
banal images of everyday life and represent, among
other things, the loss of identity of American cities.
His MoMA exhibition in 1976 strengthened the style
and affirmed color photography’s potential in the
documentary realm.
A totally diverse kind of documentary photogra-
phy that utilized snapshot-family photography-like
images appeared in the 1970s and 1980s in what
were literally private pictures with no claim on the
part of their makers to connect private with public
in an instructive manner. Including graphic vio-
lence and sexual imagery, Larry Clark’s book
Tulsa(1973), a portrait of drug-addicted teenagers
among whom were friends, acquaintances, and
those with whom he had grown up, and Nan Gold-
in’s slide show,The Ballad of Sexual Dependency
(1986) of her friends, lovers, and her own troubled
relationships, after initially shocking became cult
items and later mainstream classics.
Social documentary also gained in the 1960s with
new sources of governmental funding, especially the
National Endowment for the Arts, founded in 1965.
Increasing foundation and private support and a
larger involvement by photojournalists, who pro-
ceeded on their own to develop projects that
sometimes they started covering for the press con-
tinued to expand the field. Danny Lyon and Bruce
Davidson, for example, recorded the civil rights
movements of the 1960s on assignment and contin-
ued independently to document related subjects.
Lyon concentrated on the lives of those excludedDOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY