History of Documentary Photography Part 3

Photography has always been responsive to the suffering of humanity and the camera quickly became a tool for social reform. In New York City in the late nineteenth century, Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine used photography to expose the plight of poor immigrants and the exploitation of child labour. Hine’s shocking images resulted in the passing of the Child Labour Law. The first photograph I have included is one of Hine’s titled ‘Mill Girl,’ I think the depth of field in this image draws the viewer past the machinery to the face and stance of the girl. This is a very clever way for Hine to make his image visually eye-catching and I can really appreciate his photographs even at this early stage in photography.

During the American Depression in the 1930s, photographers such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange were employed by the Farm Security Administration, a government agency, to reveal the extent of poverty in rural America. They produced powerful evidence of the impact of the depression on farm workers across America.

Two American magazines, ‘Life’ and ‘Look’, that began in the 1930s, developed the idea of the picture story or photographic essay, where a sequence of images is produced based on a pre-determined plan. The magazine would edit the photographer’s images to present the most effective way to tell the story.

W. Eugene Smith, working for ‘Life’ magazine, became famous for his intimate and moving portrayal of his subjects. The image I have included is taken from his set ‘Country Doctor,’ which was an insight into a lifestyle most people were not accustomed to at the time and showed some really upsetting photographs in order for Evans to fully illustrate his point.

History of Documentary Photography Part 2

Documentary photography in particular has always been a way of showing the suffering of humanity, and one of the founders of this style was Richard Beard. He photographed the suffering of people in the London streets during the 1850s using daguerreotypes and was a massive influence on photographers in the future. In my opinion, following this was when documentary photographers started showing things out of the ordinary, such as Mathew Brady’s ‘Confederate War’ image taken in 1862.

The photo shows a line of dead bodies before they were buried and totally eradicated the public’s initial ideas of war, I find this fascinating as without this sort of hard evidence the Americans would have kept the belief that going to war was glamorous. At the time, The New York Times stated it was ‘like bringing the bodies and laying them at our door.’

The shocking imagery did not cease, and in the late 1870s John Thompson came along with photographs of labour and lower class living conditions in London, a lot of which featured young children. His most famous photo comes from a set named ‘The Crawlers,’ which showed street life in London. However, he had taken photos prior to this from travels around the world, I think this is a key subject particularly in the beginning of photography, as a very small portion of people were able to leave their town let alone the country.

This meant his photos in places such as Cambodia and China would be culturally and architecturally different to the norm British people were used to and was important in people being able to see into the lives of other civilisations without travelling there personally. Moreover, it is within Thompson’s photos that I began to notice the art of composition, as opposed to previous photographers who seemed to simply record the environment.

History of Documentary Photography Part 1

You could say Documentary Photography first came about merely as a way to accurately record anything from any environment. This amount of scope allowed some of the earliest practice photographs and techniques to become an important element even within photographers within the 21st century.

Initially, photography was a very long and laborious process, photographers such as Joseph Nicéphore Niépce were the first recognised photographers, Niépce created images using the process of heliography, which was essentially sundrawing. Although Niépce created one of the first photographs his work is fairly unknown and only a handful of his prints remain today.



The image above, taken in 1826, took approximately 8 hours to expose, and as you can see the sun has completely crossed the sky creating shadows on either side of the image. The time scale of taking a photograph was something that did not appeal to many people. So the practice of taking a photograph still needed to be improved in many ways.

Chronologically, Louis Daguerre was the next to make a monumental discovery in photography. His Daguerreotype was a much faster way of taking a photograph, narrowing the exposure time down to around 8 minutes. Although this was still not perfect, it made portraiture available to people which was highly sought after and also very expensive at the time.

This image of Daguerre’s taken in 1838 was a shock to those who witnessed it, due to the lack of people. In actual fact the people were there just the long exposure of the photograph made all people invisible, with the exception of a man having his shoes shined.

This process was still awkward to achieve because of the complexity of the chemicals used to expose and develop each individual plate. William Henry Fox Talbot created the essential negative which allowed photographs to be duplicated, but it was not until 1889 when George Eastman created roll film that photography became available to members of the general public, and it was at this time photography really became interesting.