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.