documentary photo background

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documentary photoltbackgroundgt
1839- 1950
- Documentary conveys truth about something in
the real world - Documentary has the ability to
communicate the photographers comment on that
truth
From its first images, photography has been
used as evidence
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War photography lt Brady, Capa gt
Historic documentary themes
Placelt Thompson Atget gt
Others lt people gt - TRAVELOGUE- Arbus, Frank
1950s - 1960s
Social justice lt Riis, Hine, FSA gt
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evidence
1839

• Daguerreotype
• the first
• commercially
• viable photographic
• process and the
• first to permanently
• record and fix an
• image with
• exposure time
• compatible with
• Portrait
• photography.

This was a positive image on a metal support.

• image is exposed directly onto a mirror-polished
  surface of silver bearing a coating of silver
  halide particles deposited by iodine vapor. In
  later developments bromine and chlorine vapors
  were also used, resulting in shorter exposure
  times. The daguerreotype is a negative image, but
  the mirrored surface of the metal plate reflects
  the image and makes it appear positive in the
  proper light. Thus, daguerreotype is a direct
  photographic process without the capacity for
  duplication.

evidence
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1838
Daguerre
evidence
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• The quality of the photographs was stunning.
• However, the process had its weaknesses
• the pictures could not be reproduced and were
  therefore unique
• the surfaces were extremely delicate, which is
  why they are often found housed under glass in a
  case
• the image was reversed laterally, the sitter
  seeing himself as he did when looking at a
  mirror. (Sometimes the camera lens was equipped
  with a mirror to correct this)
• the chemicals used (bromine and chlorine fumes
  and hot mercury) were highly toxic
• the images were difficult to view from certain
  angles.

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Historic documentary themes

Placelt Thompson Atget gt
War photography gt
Others lt people gt --- Arbus, 1950s - 1960s
Social justice lt FSA gt
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John Thompson, 1837-1921
pioneering Scottish Victorian photographer,
geographer and traveller.
Thomson's images of China and South-East Asia
brought the land, culture, and people of the Far
East alive for the 'armchair travellers' of
Victorian Britain. He was one of the pioneers of
photojournalism, using his camera to record life
on London's streets in the 1870s. As a society
photographer he also captured the rich and famous
in the years before the First World War.
Placelt Thompson Atget gt
evidence
evidence
The late 1st King of Siam', 1866. Modern albumen
print from wet-collodion negative.
Honan Soldiers', 1871. Modern albumen
stereograph from wet-collodion negative.
lt Singapore gt
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Eugene Atget 1856 - 1927 FrenchGlass plates with
view camera
Creating a complex catalog of Paris
photographing the citys streets, buildings,
shopfronts, parks and people prodigiously over a
twenty-year period.
evidence
evidence
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Eugene Atget
evidence
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Eugene Atget
evidence
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Kodak brownie

• 1900

Simple and inexpensive Accessible to anyone
When one hundred pictures had been taken the
camera was returned to Kodak who processed the
pictures.
1957 model
evidence
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Snapshot aesthetic born!
How does this easy access change the content of
images?What else changes?
evidence
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War photography lt Brady, Capa gt
Historic documentary themes
Placelt Thompson Atget gt
Social justice lt Riis, Hine, FSA gt
Others lt people gt - TRAVELOGUE- Arbus, Frank
1950s - 1960s
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Jacob Riis
Riis held various jobs before he accepted a
position as a police reporter in 1874 with the
New York Evening Sun newspaper. In 1874, he
joined the news bureau of the Brooklyn News. In
1877 he served as police reporter, this time for
the New York Tribune. During these stints as a
police reporter, Riis worked the most
crime-ridden and impoverished slums of the city.
1849-1914
New York slums
He was one of the first Americans to use flash
powder, allowing his documentation of New York
City slums to penetrate the dark of night, and
helping him capture the hardships faced by the
poor and criminal along his police beats,
especially on the notorious Mulberry Street
photographic essay on city life How The Other
Half Lives (1891)
Social justice lt Riis, Hine, FSA gt
photography__________ Social impact
FACTS about this decade Population
92,407,000 Life Expectancy Male 48.4 Female
51.8 Average Salary 750 / year
evidence
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Jacob Riis
Bandit's Roost ?
Ready for Sabbath Eve in a Coal Cellar
CRITICISMRiis's writings revealed his
prejudices against many ethnic groups,
cataloguing stereotypes of those with whom he had
less in common ethnically. Riis middle class and
Protestant backgrounds weighed heavily in his
presentation of How the Other Half Lives. Both
instilled a strong capitalist idealism while he
pitied certain poor examined as worthy, many
others he viewed with contempt. According to
Riis, certain races were doomed to failure, as
certain lifestyles caused families hardships.
evidence
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Louis Hine 1874-1940

• - Teacher
• Photographer for the National Child Labor
• Committee for ten years
• - Appointed the head photographer for the
  National Research Project of the Works
  Project Administration in 1936.

America industrialism child labor / immigrants /
labor
Girl worker in Carolina cotton mill, 1908
evidence
Newsie ca 1912
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Louis Hine
Climbing into America, Ellis Island New York, 1905
Young Russian Jewess, Ellis Island New York, 1905
evidence
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Louis Hine
lt Powerhouse Mechanic 1920
evidence
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Great Depression 1930-1939 and post-war
Population 123,188,000 in 48 states Life
Expectancy Male, 58.1 Female, 61.6 Average
salary 1,368 Unemployment rises to 25
The New Deal was the title President Franklin D.
Roosevelt gave to a sequence of programs and
promises he initiated between 1933 and 1938 with
the goal of giving reform to the people and
economy of the United States during the Great
Depression.
Farm Security Administration (FSA)
an effort during the Depression to combat rural
poverty. The FSA stressed "rural rehabilitation"
efforts to improve the lifestyle of
sharecroppers, tenants, and very poor landowning
farmers, and a program to purchase submarginal
land owned by poor farmers and resettle them in
group farms on land more suitable for efficient
farming.
Highly influential photography program, 1935-44,
Photographers and writers were hired to report
and document the plight of the poor farmer.
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Dorthea Lange
1895 1965
Lange's photographs humanized the tragic
consequences of the Great Depression and
profoundly influenced the development of
documentary photography.
evidence
Migrant Mother, 1936
White Angel Bread Line 1932
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Dorthea Lange
Jobless on Edge of Pea Field Imperial Valley,
California, 1937
Hoe Culture, near Anniston, Alabama 1936
evidence
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Dorthea Lange
evidence
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Walker Evans
1903 1975
1936
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
The original assignment was to produce a
"photographic and verbal record of the daily
living and environment of an average white family
of tenant farmers.
In addition to what some might call the excesses
of description --- the exact shape and feel and
color and texture of a pair of overalls take the
better part of a page --- we have precise
word-pictures of three families, their children,
their houses, the rooms, the furniture, the
walls, the chicken coops, the land, the land
under the houses, the roofs of the houses, the
feel of the sun, the heat in the kitchen, the
dying trees, the dust, the withering crops.
evidence
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Walker Evans
evidence
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Ben Shahn
you're not going to move anybody with this
eroded soil--but the effect this eroded soil has
on a kid who looks starved, this is going to move
people.
1898-1969

Cotton Pickers, Arkansas, 1935
evidence
Children of sharecropper, Little Rock,
Arkansas.1935
Sharecropper on Sunday, Little Rock, Arkansas
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CRITIQUE OF REALISMAs a realist form,
documentary photography needs to be approached
with a healthy dose of skepticism. The FSA
photographs were able to bring a force to bear on
their contemporary audiences because of the
realist purchase that documentary has as a genre,
and because they were produced in the 1930s, when
visual media had a particularly powerful cultural
currency.Like other realist forms, documentary
functions through the myth of objectivity.
Documentary photographs appear to be
self-generated and unmediated the conceit is
that they allow real conditions to speak for
themselves. The photographer is usually absent
from the field of the image, and we are in his or
her place, left to imagine that we would process
the scene before us in exactly such a way if we
were actually there ourselves. The mechanics of
photography help photographic images to seem
"pure" and "transparent." This effect thus
protects documentary photography, to some degree,
from what would be a customary interrogation.
Some scholars argue that what is perceived as
realism at any particular historical moment is by
necessity that which confirms the epistemological
and ideological sentiment of the time. In this
sense, the realism documentary conveys through
its mechanics, rhetoric and subject matter gives
the genre a powerful persuasive capacity.
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War photography gt
Historic documentary themes
Placelt Atget gt
Others lt people gt --- Arbus, 1950s - 1960s
Social justice lt FSA gt
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Mathew Brady 1822 - 1896
Dead Confederate Soldier, 1865
1862. Brady shocked America by displaying his
photographs of battlefield corpses from Antietam,
Maryland posting a sign on the door of his New
York gallery that read, "The Dead of Antietam."
This exhibition marked the first time most people
witnessed the carnage of war. The New York Times
said that Brady had brought "home to us the
terrible reality and earnestness of war."
evidence
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Robert Capa 1913-1954
Spanish Civil War in Catalonia (November 1938
January 1939), D-day (1944), the U.S. paratroop
invasion of Germany (March 1945),
evidence
American soldier landing on Omaha Beach, D-day,
June 1944
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Robert Capa 1913-1954
evidence
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W. Eugene Smith 1918-1978
Marine Mop-up Following Japanese Suicide
Charge Saipan, 1944
evidence
Frontline Soldier with Canteen Saipan, June 1944
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US internment camps
Anonymous, no-date
Japanese Americans interned at the Manzanar War
Relocation Center Ansel Adams
evidence

• Japanese-American internment center San Bruno,
  CA, April 29,1942. Dorothea Lange.

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Vietnam
evidence

• The Killing Fields Vietnam, Nick Ut / The
  Associated Press

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Vietnam

• Combat Photographer Eddie Adams who lifted his
  camera in synch with the general's gun, took the
  famed photo the nanosecond the bullet passed
  through the man's skull.

evidence
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US Tortures Iraqi, photographed by Unknown US
Soldier
evidence
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War photography lt Brady, Capa gt
Historic documentary themes
Placelt Thompson Atget gt
Others lt people gt - TRAVELOGUE- Arbus, Frank
1950s - 1960s
Social justice lt Riis, Hine, FSA gt
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Robert FrankDiane ArbusWilliam Klein
Documentary post WWII 1950s

• The war brought the return of prosperity, and in
  the postwar period the United States consolidated
  its position as the world's richest country.
• Growth of the suburbs- Birth of the Mall
• Television
• Baby Boom
• Those active in the war as equals (women and
  African Americans) forced to assume prior
  position in culture as 2nd class.

Consistent theme critical towards the American
dream // examine an American Mythology
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The Family of Man 1955 Edward Steichen

• The exhibit travelled all over the world, and
  consisted of over 500 images of humanity taken by
  over 270 photographers, some famous, and some
  unknown. Steichen and his helpers had an image
  database of over 2 million photographs from which
  they selected 10,000 before choosing the final
  exhibit of just over 500.
• Exhibition at MOMA is marketed as striking
  snapshot of the human experience which lingers on
  birth, love, and joy, but also touches war,
  privation, illness and death. His intention was
  to prove visually the universality of human
  experience and photography's role in its
  documentation.

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Robert Frank 1924
Radically different than Family of Man approach
In 1955, Robert Frank set out to observe and
photograph the United States. Supported by a
grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, he traveled
across the country for two years. Frank sought to
reveal the profound tensions he saw in all strata
of American society during the outwardly
optimistic 1950s. His photographic journey
encompasses rich and poor, black and white, north
and south, offering a glimpse of what makes these
people and places truly American.
1958
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Robert Frank
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Diane Arbus
1923 1971
"
Most people go through life dreading they'll have
a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with
their trauma. They've already passed their test
in life. They're aristocrats.
"
"
What I'm trying to describe is that it's
impossible to get out of your skin into somebody
else's... That somebody else's tragedy is not the
same as your own.
"
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Diane Arbus
Arbus' early work was created using 35mm cameras,
but by the 1960s Arbus adopted the Rolleiflex
medium format twin-lens reflex. This format
provided a square aspect ratio, higher image
resolution, and a waist-level viewfinder that
allowed Arbus to connect with her subjects in
ways that a standard eye-level viewfinder did
not. Arbus also experimented with the use of
flashes in daylight, allowing her to highlight
and separate her subjects from the background.
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Diane Arbus
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Diane Arbus
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William Klein 1928
as an artist using photography, he set out to
re-invent the photographic document. his photos,
often blurred or out of focus, his
high-contrast prints (his negatives were often
severely over-exposed), his use of high-grain
film and wide angles shocked the established
order of the photography world and he earned a
reputation as an anti-photographer's
photographer.

I was a make believe ethnographer treating new
yorkers like an explorer would treat zulus
- searching for the rawest snapshot, the zero
degree of photography.

• Broadway and 103rd Street
• New York, 1954-55

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William Klein
quartier italien, 1954
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William Klein
Horn Hardart, Lexington Avenue 1954-55
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