arts curriculum. Teachers such as Moholy-Nagy,
Gyorgy Kepes, and Herbert Bayer used photogra-
phy to expand their students’ vision. They prized
the negative as an end in itself, used the photogram
as a teaching tool, and took pictures from un-
orthodox viewpoints. For Moholy-Nagy, the
photograph was a necessary tool for the advance-
ment of an enhanced appreciation of things. He
delighted in all manner of technical imagery in-
cluding X-rays, photomicrographs, and motion
photography. In his influential book, Painting,
Photography, Film (1925), Moholy extended his
conviction that photography was an essential part
of the modern sensibility. This was a motif in teach-
ing and publications. After the Nazis threatened the
Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy fled first to England, then
to Chicago, where he founded the New Bauhaus
(later the School of Design and the Institute of
Design) bringing his venerable Constructivist-
inspired notions of photography’s utility to a gen-
eration of artists, designers, and photographers.
Documentary Photography
Although photographs had been made to docu-
ment all manner of things in the nineteenth cen-
tury, it was not until the 1930s that they came to be
admired for their aesthetic value alone. Addition-
ally, technological advances such as miniature cam-
eras as the 35 mm format was initially known,
quick shutters, and faster film, changed both the
process and the resulting documentary imagery.
In many ways, the photographs of Euge`ne Atget
spanbothcenturies.Hemadesome10,000pictures
in an attempt to document the entirety of pictur-
esque Paris: its denizens, its alleys, parks, and old
buildings. Atget sold them to architects, set de-
signers,andartistsandworkedinrelativeobscurity
until being ‘‘discovered’’ by Man Ray, and by his
assistant, Berenice Abbott. She saved his entire body
of work upon his death in 1927; today it is housed in
the Museum of Modern Art, in New York. Simi-
larly, a group of enigmatic photographs of New
Orleans prostitutes by the amateur E. J. Bellocq (c.
1912) were discovered. They were later printed by
Lee Friedlander. In the twentieth century, the appre-
ciation for photography elevated the status of many
previously unrecognized talents. Such was the case
with James VanderZee, whose decade-long career in
New York City as a professional photographer was
recognized as producing a veritable documentary
portrait of the Harlem Renaissance.
Most documentary photography in the twentieth
century has been socially concerned. As a teacher
at the progressive Ethical Culture School in New
York, and as a trained sociologist, Lewis Hine was
genuinely interested in social justice, and used his
pictures to affect change. Beginning in 1905, he
began taking pictures of Ellis Island immigrants.
To make his most important body of work, he
traveled to mines and textile mills to document
children at work. These images were then used to
change child labor laws.
The economic crisis of the American Depression
provided the impetus for a major documentary
project. Under the direction of Roy Stryker, an
economics professor, a group of photographers
under the aegis of the Farm Security Administra-
tion (FSA) was sent to rural America to document
the effects of poverty. Another part of its mission
was to justify in pictures the successes of President
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs.
Photographers such as Arthur Rothstein, Walker
Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, and Ben
Shahn were sent to the hardest hit areas of the
country, often to the Dust Bowl, where farmers
were being driven from their land by the harsh
weather and blighted economy. Stryker often
briefed photographers before they went into the
field. They sent their rolls of film back to Washing-
ton, D.C., for developing. Today, thousands of
their photographs—which were used at the time
in posters, advertising, and in all manner of public
forums—are housed in the Library of Congress.
Although each photographer had a certain style,
overall, FSA photographs show a heightened sense
of compassion and often a concern for pictorial
values. Photography also played a large part in
the collaborative projects associated with the
time. These include Walker Evans’s pictures for
James Agee’s book on Alabama sharecropper
families,Let Us Now Praise Famous Men(1941),
and Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Cald-
well’s book on the South,You Have Seen Their
Faces(1937).
The New York-based Photo League (1930–1951)
was a group of liberal photographers and film-
makers committed to depicting the urban poor.
They produced important projects such as theHar-
lem Document, but aroused suspicion during the
McCarthy era for their left-wing politics. In Eng-
land, at nearly the same time, a project called Mass-
Observation also sought to understand national
identity by accruing documentary information.
Founded in 1936 by the journalist and poet Charles
Madge, and including the participation of film-
makers and natural scientists, it sought to amass
raw data about daily life and about Britain’s status
quo. Ordinary people took countless photographs
of their lives and provided information about theirHISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY: TWENTIETH-CENTURY DEVELOPMENTS