shop fronts, architectural details and statuary, trees and greenery, and individuals who made their living as street vendors, producing some 10,000 photographs of Paris and its environs.
Unlike many of the architectural photographers before him, Atget showed a remarkable attention to composition,
the materiality of substances, the quality of light, and especially the photographer’s feelings about the subject matter. His work was bought mainly by architects, painters, and archivists. The visually expressive force of Atget’s work, produced with a large-format camera, is a testament to the capacity of documentation to surpass mere record making to become inspiring experience.
In like manner, although not as extensively, Czech photographer Josef Sudek created an artistic document of his immediate surroundings.
He was particularly fascinated with his home and garden, often shooting the latter through a window.
Lewis W. Hine created a similarly thorough document of a subject, in his case immigrant and working-class life in the United States.
One of the first to refer to himself as a social photographer, Hine began his documentation of immigrants at Ellis Island while still a teacher at the Ethical Culture School in New York.
Eventually he gave up teaching to work for the National Child Labor Committee, an organization of progressives seeking to make the American industrial economy more aware of its effects on individual workers.
From 1908 to 1916 Hine concentrated on photographing child workers, producing thousands of individual portraits and group scenes of underage children employed in textile mills, mines, canning establishments, and glass factories and in street trades throughout the United States. His work was effective in prompting first state regulation and eventually federal regulation of child labour.
Documentary photography experienced a resurgence in the United States during the Great Depression, when the federal government undertook a major documentary project. Produced by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) under the direction of Roy E. Stryker, who earlier had come in contact with Hine’s work, the project comprised more than 270,000 images produced by 11 photographers working for varying lengths and at different times in different places. All worked to show the effects of agricultural displacement caused by the economic downturn, lack of rain, and wasteful agricultural practices in the American South and midlands. In this project, documentation did double duty. One task was to record conditions both on nonfunctioning farms and in new homesteads created by federal legislation. Another was to arouse compassion so that problems addressed by legislative action would win support.
A portrait of a pea picker’s wife,
made by California portraitist turned documentarian Dorothea Lange, became an icon of the anxiety generated by the Great Depression.
Walker Evans was another photographer whose work for the FSA transformed social documentation from mere record making into transcendent visual expression. On leave from the FSA, Evans worked with James Agee on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941; reissued 1966), a compelling look at the lives of a family of Southern sharecroppers.
Although unaffiliated with the FSA, Margaret Bourke-White, formerly one of the era’s foremost industrial photographers, also worked in the South. With her husband, writer Erskine Caldwell, she produced You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), one of the first photographic picture books to appear in softcover.
Documentary projects underwritten by other federal agencies also existed. One of more significant projects was executed by Berenice Abbott. Inspired in part by Atget’s studies of Paris, she endeavoured to photograph the many parts of New York City and to create “an intuition of past, present, and future.”
She was able to interest the Works Projects Administration (WPA) in underwriting an exhibit and publication along these lines entitled Changing New York (1939).
The German portraitist August Sander, intent on creating a sociological document of his own, generated a portrait of Germany during this period.
His focus was on the individuals composing German society, documenting a class structure with workers and farmers on the bottom. Sander’s inclusion of types not considered Aryan by German authorities brought him into conflict with the Nazi regime, which destroyed the plates for a proposed book entitled Antlitz der Zeit (“Face of Our Time”).
Among the many other amateur and professional photographers who interested themselves in the documentation of everyday life were Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, who portrayed everyday life in Russia;
Manuel Alvarez Bravo,
who created images that offer a psychologically nuanced glimpse of Mexican life.
Robert Doisneau
Brassaï
both of whom captured vibrant images of everyday life in Paris. (Doisneau photo I used above obviously not from Paris)
Perhaps the most extensive ethnographic documentation was that of Edward S. Curtis, who produced 20 volumes of studies of Native American tribes people over the course of some 20 years.
The enormous interest in how people outside Western culture appeared and behaved was a factor in the increasing popularity of National Geographic during this period.
text from britannica
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